Woman Adopts 1200 Wild Horses

(Elko, NV) A Pitkin woman has adopted some 1200 wild horses from a wandering herd recently cornered in the Ruby Mountains south of here.

Sylvia Hoofe, animal rights advocate, and heir to a lavish genetic oats fortune, said that the animals are to be transported to Colorado this morning. Despite grumbling from the town she plans to care for the horses in her small backyard on Quartz Street until good homes can be found.

“Sylvia has already begun construction on feeding troughs, barn doors and fence,” said longtime business associate Utts “Fried” Rice, of Ohio City. “She was down here in town buying materials all weekend. I’ve never seen her so exited, except perhaps when her cat had kittens back in 1978. Yesterday she told me she’s going to hire about 150 trainers.”

At that high-minded student-teacher ratio Hoofe can easily qualify for tax credits and a federal grant which should cover feed for at least a week. After that the fate of the horses is unknown.

“They’re better off here in Pitkin with me than standing around in some railroad box car bound for the dog food plants in Sparks,” said Hoofe over last Wednesday’s edition of the New York Times. “What else could I do? After pleas from everyone from the Butane Society to the governor’s office I couldn’t just turn my back.”

Hoofe isn’t afraid of taking on the responsibility either. Between fighting off critics and checking her emails she’s reportedly working at a seven and twenty-four pace. Her regular 16 cups of coffee per day has jumped to 25 and she’s lost 9 pounds since last night. Friends say they expect that she’ll settle down as soon as the primary phase is completed.

“She’s a real spark-plug,” adds Rice. “Her energy is endless. Already she has named over 400 of the animals.”

“Sure, the adoptions will change my life but that’s a good thing. I need a challenge and besides, I got tired of going to the bar every day at noon. If things turn to…ah, bad, I’ll just leave town. Hell, I’ve got silly little quasi-Victorians in dinky, undiscovered towns all over the New West.”

The move is particularly queer considering that when Hoofe was 6-years-old she was deathly afraid of horses, in fact all herd animals. It was back during those formative years that a composition brood mare vindictively stepped on her kicking foot and her business end was savagely gored by a Peloponnesian- Brahman Bull in the space of three hours.

Later that week while recovering from her injuries, she watched in suspended horror as her brother Billy Buck Hoofe was side-swiped by a cutting horse he was riding near Cody, Wyoming, landing over in Montana before the mail, the next afternoon.

“It ain’t easy being me,” chided Hoofe, climbing into her $125,000 Hessian-built, Montevideoan Henway. “But it’s probably easier than being someone else.”

It is estimated that more than 100,000 wild horses roam the Great Basin, compromising desert shrubs in parts of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming and  California. Round-ups are held periodically when the animals pose a nuisance or when local cowpunchers get bored chasing their own mounts. Sometimes the horses, especially those deemed incorrigible, are destroyed.

The adoption is the largest of its kind ever recorded unless one counts the Naturita prairie dog migration of 1983 when some 1.6 million of the rodents moved to Canada in protest over the U.S. invasion of Grenada. – Uncle Pahgre