WHIP INTO SHAPE

The burro in the round pen eyes her companions in the adjoining corral. Halter firmly in hand, a trainer guides the jenny past them, stopping to rub her neck generously before leading her a few more steps forward. “This jenny is newer and just learning how to lead,” head trainer Indy O’Connor says from atop a dappled gray mustang.

The trainer gently pulls the lead in the direction he wants the burro to go, creating pressure on her face. When she takes a step, the trainer releases. “So, we’re teaching the donkey that the good deal is to follow,” O’Connor says, “and the bad deal is you get pressure.”

On this day, most of the wild burros at the Florence Correctional Center training facility, southeast of the Phoenix area, are newer — as are the incarcerated men learning to train them. Some of the more experienced trainers earned their release from prison around the time the burros they gentled were adopted. Of the four men in the pen, the most experienced has been in the program nine months; the newer trainers, about two months. “We hook up guys who are new with guys who have been here for a while,” O’Connor explains, “so they also learn how to be part of a team.”

The trainer hands the lead to one of the newer men; although he’s muscle-bound and tattooed, he has more trouble getting the burro to follow. Both he and the burro find themselves in a similar position: They’re learning something new in a place they didn’t ask to be. Having that in common is part of what makes this training so successful — for man and beast.

THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT oversees most of the wild horse herds in the country, and managing them is one of the agency’s biggest headaches. But in Arizona, the bigger challenge is wild burros, of which Arizona has more than any other state. And in every herd management area the BLM oversees in Arizona, the number of burros far exceeds the land’s capacity to support them. Those areas include tourist destinations where burros have become a nuisance at campgrounds. They also damage crops and linger on roadways.

“Over 100 have been hit [by vehicles] in the last year,” says John A. Hall, Arizona’s wild horse and burro program lead. That’s a result of people feeding them from vehicles, approaching them and giving them water. “It leads to them hanging out in places they shouldn’t be,” Hall says, and when that happens, the BLM has to remove them.

Most of the burros captured in Arizona are prepared for adoption at the BLM’s holding facility in Florence — the agency’s only such facility in the state. From there, some of them are shipped to adoption events around the country or elsewhere in Arizona. Others are placed with burro rescue organizations for their training programs. And a small number are trained by people incarcerated at the nearby prison. The partnership between the BLM and the Arizona Department of Corrections is one of a handful of efforts around the country; collectively, these efforts make up the Wild Horse Inmate Program, or WHIP.

Typically, 50 to 75 burros per year are trained in the prison program — a relatively small number, but enough, Hall says, to show that these wild animals are trainable. The program also gives incarcerated people a job that can be rewarding and likely is different from anything else they’ve done. In the process, participants learn life skills that can help them be successful once they’re released.

The idea of using therapeutic animals in institutions isn’t new — the first recorded instance was in 1919, when a
government-run mental hospital brought in a dog as an experimental playmate. And a 1975 study at a hospital for the criminally insane found that patients in a ward with access to pets required half the medication as, and experienced less violence than, those in an otherwise identical ward.

In 1986, the state penitentiary in Cañon City, Colorado, was among the first prisons to develop a wild horse program, and it quickly inspired similar programs in other Western states. When the Florence prison began considering a WHIP program in 2011, the BLM reached out to Randy Helm. The pastor and former undercover narcotics officer grew up in a ranching family and bought his first mustang from the agency in 1994. He eventually became involved with adoption events, running clinics to teach potential adopters how to gentle a mustang.

After attending one of those clinics, a Department of Corrections official asked Helm to submit his résumé and ultimately hired him to start the Florence program. Helm spent his first six months putting policies, procedures and infrastructure in place; he also visited other programs, including Cañon City’s. The program officially launched in May 2013.

“Arizona has a huge population of wild burros,” Helm says. “So, we’d bring the burros over and started training them, first gentling them and then training them for pack.” The prison’s industrial yard fabricated a burro cart for cart training. Larger burros also got saddle trained.

And if the program was unconventional, so was the training. Traditionally, training horses and burros involves correcting them to produce a desired behavior. Helm turned that method on its head, employing a progressive system based on trust. The system works for both horses and burros, although burros require a slightly different approach.

“Horses, you train off of movement; you can get them to do something and help them figure out what you’re asking them to do,” Helm says. “But a donkey wants to see your résumé first.” And while horse training begins with a lot of work in a round pen, Helm says, “Burros go around one time and go, ‘OK, I have no idea why you’re asking me to go around again; I saw the whole thing.’ ”

But burros gentle faster and form deep bonds. Trainers often describe them as having the same temperament as a dog: curious, friendly and loyal. They also protect livestock from predators such as coyotes and bobcats. Some adopters use them as pack animals, but most keep them as companion animals or pets.

O’Connor took over the training after Helm retired in 2020, and while he had a different mentor, he employs the same basic philosophy. “We’re firm but fair,” says O’Connor, who earned his nickname “the hard way,” while working with a mustang named Indy. “I thought I knew more than I did,” he explains. “So, I took the name of the horse to remind me that I don’t know everything.”

“Firm but fair” also sums up the approach to working with incarcerated people — “trainers” to the staff. Staff members say “please” and “thank you” and encourage trainers to treat each other with respect, as equals. That’s been life-changing for many.

“There’s this quote I really like by Charles Darwin,” says Juan V., the trainer who leads the burro team. “Human evolution is not based on who’s the strongest or the most intelligent, but those willing to change. No matter how smart you can be, you can’t outsmart this animal. No matter how strong, that one’s going to win. You have to change with them.

“[If] I show up one day extremely sad, which translates to anger in me, they will kick me or they will bite me. So, I have to come with a positive attitude … headache or no headache, problems or no problems. And at the end of the day, I can rest calm. I can sleep better. And the next day is going to be better.”

"There's this quote I really like by Charles Darwin," says Juan V., the trainer who leads the burro team. "Human evolution is not based on who's the strongest or the most intelligent, but those willing to change. No matter how smart you can be, you can't outsmart this animal. No matter how strong, that one's going to win. You have to change with them.

"[If] I show up one day extremely sad, which translates to anger in me, they will kick me or they will bite me. So, I have to come with a positive attitude... headache or no headache, problems or no problems. And at the end of the day, I can rest calm. I can sleep better. And the next day is going to be better."
 

IN 2019, A GRADUATE STUDENT at the University of Arizona studied recidivism among WHIP participants at Florence. None of the people in the study who had been in the program for a year or more returned to prison in the year after their release. And after three years, those in a group closely matched to those in the program returned to prison three times more often.

Anecdotally, success stories are legion. “We’ve had a few [people] who have come through the program and it’s been pretty life-changing for them,” staff member Mike Lundberg says.

Among them is Chris Maiorana, one of Florence’s first WHIP participants. “I owe that program everything,” says Maiorana, who was released in 2013. Part of what the program taught him was discipline: Depending on the time of year, he got up every day at 2 or 4 a.m. to go to work. “On the other side is empathy and love,” he says. “You love these animals. It was an incredible opportunity to find meaning in a change of environment. It changed my whole life.”

Brandon Paul was in prison for the third time when he joined the program in 2017. “What led me there was I turned professional in drinking and drugging,” he says. Staring up at the ceiling in Phoenix’s Fourth Avenue Jail after his final arrest, he recalls, he knew he was done. He just didn’t know how he was going to stay that way.

“The very first day I was at Wild Horse, I had butterflies in my heart,” he says. But when he stepped into a round pen with a wild animal for the first time, he felt a sense of peace: “I knew at that moment that this is what I was made to do.”

Working with mustangs, Paul remained in the program for four years. The work taught him patience, but also to communicate by listening to what the horse’s behavior was telling him, and to think creatively. “If you’re pushing too hard, you need to take a step back and reassess things,” he says. “You don’t know this horse’s history. You have to be compassionate with how they feel, because you can’t read their minds. I think [the program] works because these horses have a way of bringing things out of you, especially if you have somebody guiding that experience.”

Released in 2021, Paul now trains horses professionally. He also does equine therapy with addicts through a rehab program. “I found my purpose,” he says. “And I was blessed to be able to share everything I learned and everything I have. I think that’s really what life’s all about.”