The Loveable, Hateable Burro

He's got ears like semaphore flags, a fuzzy coat and limpid, droopy eyes. He's smart, durable and tenacious as well as obstinate, mean and downright ornery and he may have contributed more to the winning of the West than any other animal, save perhaps the horse.

Yet, today, those same qualities that once made the humble burro so useful have also made him the storm center of controversy.

At issue, paradoxically, is his very right to survive or at least to survive in the numbers made possible by his natural fecundity.

What brought about the complex love/hate attitude toward the burro is the fact that, along with being a love-able critter, he's doing hateful things to his environment. Or so say his detractors. The arid regions of the West the natural habitat of the free-ranging burro constitute a fragile ecosystem. The burro, aggressive, competitive and proliferating all over the place, destroys the range that sustains him, according to his critics. They say he fouls water-holes, drives other animals away and consumes forage that should be sustaining those others as well. It is alleged, for instance, that in some parts of Arizona and in other Western states as well the survival of the desert big-horn sheep is threatened.

What manner of animal is it that has caused all this commotion He's a tough, wiry little fellow, about the size of a Shetland pony. His usually gray, sometimes gray-black and always nondescript coat blends in with the surrounding desert, giving him as nice a natural camouflage as a wild animal could want.

But wait. The word "wild" really doesn't apply to the burro, wild though he is by any ordinary definition. The technical word for him is "feral." That means he was once domesticated, or at least his ancestors were, and then they went back to the wilderness. They are also called "exotics," which simply means non-native.

Most of them are descendants of burros abandoned or lost by the prospectors and traders who began the long process of civilizing this thorny land. "Brains, brawn, burros and beans, with some luck thrown in," wrote one historian, were the "four cardinal essentials to the success of the American prospector." "Two-thirds of the New World would hardly have been civilized yet without (the burro)," wrote another.

Sometime around the third quarter of the last century, a peddler named Jacob Isaacson led a burro train loaded with housewares and clothing from Tucson to a walnut grove south of Tubac. He built a trading post there and called it, naturally enough, "Isaacson." But the Mexicans couldn't pronounce the word. It kept coming out "Eez-ah-ockson." So what stands there now an urban monument, as it were, to the burro's role in 19th century Western commerce is the town we know as Nogales (Spanish for "walnuts").

Northwest of Nogales a piece is a place called Ruby. Not much is to be seen there today, but once it had a population of 350 or more and a lead and zinc mine said to have yielded $3 million worth of ore. Without the sure-footed burro, there'd have been no Ruby. For the nearest water, in any quantity at all, was in the Santa Cruz Valley, 17 miles away, with some very rugged country between. Under the direction of an engineer who knew his burros, wells were drilled near the Santa Cruz. Then the burros, working in pairs, hauled 4-inch pipe, a joint at a time, with a burro at each end, to build a 17-mile pipe line up the canyon to Ruby. The pipe made the difference between nothing and 3 million bucks, and to this day that stretch of broken country from Santa Cruz to Ruby is called Pipe Line Canyon.

The burro, as contrary then as now, would even though hobbled wander away from the prospector who owned him, leaving the grizzled gold-seeker in the lurch. Hence, when the Ford Model T came along, prospectors by the score turned their burros loose without shed-ding a tear. Then they tossed their picks and shovels into their trusty "Tin Lizzies" and took off for the glory hole they knew was just over the rise.

The liberated burros reproduced, as burros are wont to do. And these or leastways their progeny several generations removed are the feral animals that dot the public lands of the West today, some 14,000 strong.

They are extraordinarily hardy creatures. They eat whatever is at hand cactus, palo verde, needle-like desert grass. Harry Goulding, the patriarch of Monument Valley, had a burro that even ate chewing tobacco. It made him sick, but when he got to feeling better, he ate some more.

Frank Brookshier, in his fine book, The Burro, tells of a New York lady whose project to build houses on a tract of land she'd bought in the Virgin Islands was thwarted, temporarily, by a hungry burro. It ate her blueprints.

And then there was the old sour-dough who, having had a few too many nips from the jug, took his dentures out and laid them on a rock. A moment later, as his back was turned, his burro ambled up and swallowed them!

Along with being able to subsist on almost any kind of provender, the burro can endure with remarkably little water. A drink every 20 to 24 hours in summer, every three days in winter is enough. And it is said that he can scent water farther than any other animal except the camel, even when it's underground.

"There are few animals more fit to survive in the desert," says Dr. Robert Ohmart, Associate Professor of Zoology at Arizona State University, who has been carrying on an intensive study of the burro." It can stand extreme cold and searing heat. It is amazingly disease-resistant. It has no natural ene-mies. Infant burro mortality is virtually nil. Almost every animal dropped sur-vives," says Dr. Ohmart.

Add to all this the fact that the burro lives an extraordinarily long time, as animals go. Its average life span is 25 years. In the town of Cottonwood, some years ago, there was a burro named Old Ned. He became a town institution, carrying children to school, falling asleep standing up in the middle of the street while people walked or drove around him. Finally, on a stormy night, he was standing on a bank of dirt that gave way. He fell into a pit, was covered over with dirt and suffocated. He was 44.

The burro is as noisy, though, as he is durable and fit. His raucous bray has won him such sardonic appellations as the "desert canary" and the "Colorado mocking bird." A poetic student of the species speculates that, when the burro looses one of its strident noises, it may be crying out "against the pain of existence." "The bray of a stud burro in the mating season," says another perceptive observer, "... is a challenge like that of a bull moose, only shriller and more drawn out . . ."

The burro can contend, though, and with solid justification, that his right to emit his horrific outcry has been fully upheld by the law. Citizens of a California town whose ears were assaulted repeatedly by the brays of a corral full of burros sought relief in court. Imagine their dismay when the court sustained the burros. "We know of no heaven-sent maxim to invent a silencer for the brute . . . ," declared the judge solemnly, albeit perhaps with tongue in cheek.

"We fear that until nature evolves a whispering burro . . . we shall oft in the dead vast and middle of the night . . . hear the loud discordant bray of this sociable but shrill-toned friend of man, filling the air with barbarous dis-sonance."

As legendary as his bray is his obstinacy. You can domesticate him, of course after all, it was in that more-or-less civilized state that he first came to this country. But don't expect him to like it. "Burros," spoke a philosophical burro owner, "have one great concern in life: To find out what you want them to do and then not to do it." "A full-grown burro," quoth another, "is 500 pounds of free enterprise."

The story is told of a burro packing salt to a sheep camp. At a point he apparently decided that his load was just too heavy. Wading across a stream, he suddenly stopped and lay down on his side, dissolving his cargo of salt.

It has been said that the burro really isn't obstinate it just possesses "passive wisdom." Certainly it is among the more intelligent of nature's dumb creatures vastly more intelligent than the horse. "Unlike the horse," says author Brookshier, "the burro never cuts himself on barbed wire by running into it as a horse will do. Even when he is frightened, he does not lose his head to the extent that he dashes into such a 'barbarous' obstacle. If by some quirk of events beyond his control one of his legs becomes entangled in wire, he will not fight or attempt to extricate himself. He will use his innate intelligence and characteristic patience and wait for his master to come to his rescue. Smart burro."

The burro's native intelligence has had much to do with its ability to endure. Old-timers tell of the prospector who abandoned a claim and left a line of two-inch pipe, the upper end of which originated in a covered spring. The pipe line was old and rusty, but some smart (and thirsty) burros soon learned to kick it in its weak spots to get enough water for a drink.

But the burro is not always as endearing as he seems. "He can be a rather terrifying animal," says William R. Hernbrode, Conservation Education Coordinator for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, "as you'd find out if you ever saw a fight between two jacks. They literally bite chunks out of each other. I watched two of them fight for 65 minutes in the mountains near Oat-man. It was a bloody show.

"Another time we were on an elk survey in the Mogollon Rim country. A guy picked up a burro jack and put him in a pasture. A day and a half later we found a blind elk calf. We put it in the same pasture. The minute we turned it loose, here came the jack, ears flat. As he reached the elk calf, he whirled and hit out with both his heels. If the calf hadn't dropped at that precise moment, it would have been killed. I think the burro did it out of sheer orneriness."

As one might deduce, Hernbrode is not the best friend the burro ever had, although his disenchantment springs more from environmental than emotional considerations, "You can't help but admire him," says Hernbrode. "He's superbly equipped to take care of himself." But where the burro grazes, he contends, there's a "fantastic destruction of vegetation.

"The habitat, once destroyed, may never recover," he explains. "You lose ground cover, and then, during periods of drouth, the sun heats the soil that the ground cover had shielded. Seeds don't germinate. Then the rain rushes off instead of soaking in. The Dust Bowl was a prime example of this sort of thing. We have 7000 years of history telling us what not to do, and we've done it."

Complicating the problem is the fact of the feral burro's high rate of reproduction. In one of the regions being studied by ASU's Dr. Ohmart, the burros increase in numbers of 20 to 25 per cent every 13 to 18 months. In other words, every four to six years they double their population. In the words of a U.S. Park Service official, "If we don't do something, we'll be up to our ears in asses."

Range management people say they know what ought to be done. The number of burros should simply be reduced. But in 1971, in a burst of patriotic sentiment, Congress approved a bill which said, in effect: Hands off the burro (and the wild horse as well). President Nixon, signing the bill into law, spoke movingly of the role played by the burro and the wild horse in the building of the nation.

The legislation actually resulted from a "children's lobby" a letter-writing campaign that swept the elementaryschools. “One 12-year-old boy testified before a congressional committee,” says Hernbrode. “He’d never seen a wild horse or burro in his life, but Congress just said, ah, yes, and gave him what he wanted. The experts testified for days, but the congressmen wouldn't listen to the experts. They just heard the boy and passed the law.”

schools. “One 12-year-old boy testified before a congressional committee,” says Hernbrode. “He’d never seen a wild horse or burro in his life, but Congress just said, ah, yes, and gave him what he wanted. The experts testified for days, but the congressmen wouldn't listen to the experts. They just heard the boy and passed the law.” Before that, the burro population was kept more or less informally in check. Professional burro hunters moved onto the range with their trucks, corralled the burros (and some wild horses, too) and sold them for dog food. The game and fish people, policing the range to protect other species such as the big-horn sheep, helped out. “We killed them whenever we wanted,” says HernHernbrode. “We took the choice cuts of burro meat for ourselves and gave the rest away for dog food. A man near Kingman, with a mink ranch, fed his mink on burro meat. Now, if I killed a burro, I'd get a $2000 fine and lose my job.” Out in northwestern Arizona, on the Colorado River, the town of Bullhead City held an annual wild burro barbecue, feeding as many as 4000 people. That's a thing of the past now.

“It's so irrational, the attitude of people toward the burro,” says Hernbrode. “Most of them are from the Eastern urban areas. They've never seen a burro except in a Walt Disney movie. And the burro is a charming animal but not in a range setting.” There is not, to be sure, solid agreement on what should be done about the problem, or even whether there is a problem. All that the burro has done, says one of its ardent and articulate champions, is settle down on land that no man used or wanted, asking “only the right to fight the bitter battle of adaption against the most adverse natural conditions.” Patricia Moehlman, a zoologist, did a study of wild burros in the Panamint Range of Nevada's Death Valley and reported, “Contrary to widely held belief, the burros I observed did not strip the land, foul waterholes or endanger other animals.

“I do not deny that bighorn sheep might be affected by burro overpopulation,” she said, “but to condemn the burro is to oversimplify a complex question, one that involves such things as climatic cycles and human population pressures. What we need is a program of burro management based upon systematic factual knowledge of the animals' role in the environment, so that we can say with certainty at just what point burro numbers start to take a toll.” This is precisely what Dr. Ohmart's study is designed to do, and he has a federal grant to do it. But just as politics i.e., the 1971 wild-horse-and-burro law - created the problem of burro glut (if, in fact, there is a glut), politics is handicapping those who would do something about it. Recently a Delaware senator, William V. Roth, Jr., nominated Dr. Ohmart's study for his "federal frill of the year" award. With the tart invective of an Eastern politician sniffing a Western boondoggle, he said the ASU study was "responsive to a clear public nondemand, is addressed to a wholly unpressing need and, from all appearances, is 100 per cent nonessential." "Obviously there are no burros in Delaware," says Dr. Ohmart drily. The ASU zoologist wrote a letter to the Delaware senator and managed to inject into it a little tartness of his own. He pointed out that the 1971 law gave the U.S. Bureau of Land Management a responsibility for managing burros and wild horses on federal lands and added, "It is difficult to manage something if you know nothing about it, and universities can do the research more inexpensively and have more credibility than federal agencies." Dr. Ohmart went on to say that the passage of that '71 law "gives greater protection to wild horses and burros than the sacred cow of India, without knowledge of potential damage to natural ecosystems in the arid Southwest (and) was probably a mistake." In conclusion, wrote Dr. Ohmart, "I suggest you pursue subjects deeper than simply reading titles of research proposals." Up to this writing the professor had received no reply from the senator from Delaware. And so there they stand, these equine iconoclasts, placidly munching on their cactus and their palo verde, while the passions of political and ecological conflict swirl around them. And there, almost surely, they will always be, in whatever numbers. For nobody seriously would propose that we do away with the feral burros. They're too much a part of us and of this desert land. They're too much a part of our history and our color. An official of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management put it very well indeed when he gave assurance not long ago that his agency would see to the preservation of the burros and wild horses on the 170 million Western acres under BLM's stewardship. Said he, simply: "They belong."

Hope for the Burro, yet

Editor's Note: One partial solution to the burro problem, which may have value in other areas, is a recent plan developed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for Alamo Lake in western Arizona. It's called the "Adopt-A-Burro Program." In addition to helping solve serious overgrazing, says BLM, it also is bringing delight to animal fanciers across the nation. After three years of extensive research, supplemented by a study of the natural history of wild burros, which was contracted to Arizona State University, BLM began reducing burro numbers to stop deterioration of the range and to prevent the Alamo wild burro herd from destroying itself through disease and starvation. Fortunately, the Wild Horse and Burro Act anticipated that over-population might occur, and provisions were included in the Act for humane control of herds. The preferred method was a public adoption process. Thus, the Arizona "Adopt-A-Burro" Program was born, which now has spread to California and Nevada. The results were astonishing. Requests came from as far off as Florida and Vermont. Each applicant was screened to determine if he or she could properly care for the animal and would not be using it for commercial purposes, then the individuals were notified where and when to pick up their wild burro. But that is not the end of the problem. Many biologists feel the damage at Alamo is only the tip of the iceberg. Burro populations continue to multiply at a rate of about 20 per cent per year. More and more cries now are being heard to amend the federal law that some feel provides more protection than the wildlife and the land can endure. But even those who hate wild burros most aren't suggesting they be totally removed from the land. There is an ecological niche for the wild and free-roaming burro, but someone will have to convince Mr. Longears to stay within it.

Bookshelf

by Donald M. Powell Adventure Beacons. By Ira B. Jorale-mon. Society of Mining Engineers of AIME, New York, 1976. 487 pp. $16.50. Ira Joralemon, whose Romantic Copper has long been considered a standard history of the copper industry, wrote these memoirs before his recent death.

His long career as exploration geologist and mine consultant was bound up with copper. His work took him to many corners of the world, but he began his work in Bisbee and did exploration work in Arizona. In 1909 he examined the ore bodies in the Twin Buttes area south of Tucson and advised against development. The technology of the time made mining the low grade ore uneconomical. His reminiscences make enjoyable reading not for geologists alone.

Mineral and Gem Locations in Arizona. By Lee Hammons. Arizona Maps and Books, Sedona, Arizona, 1977. 111 pp. $5.95.

This one should gladden the hearts of the rockhounds. Lee Hammons, out of his years of experience, has compiled a practical manual for making, cataloging and maintaining a mineral collection, with hints on prospecting. The main part of the book consists of 30 maps in color, pinpointing locations where the collector can expect to find specimens. The maps are not too difficult for the amateur to use or too elementary for the professional.

Who knows? This useful book may make a whole new generation of enthusiasts for the minerals with which Arizona is so richly endowed.

Ben K. Green, a Descriptive Bibliogra-phy of Writings by and about Him. Compiled by Robert A. Wilson. North-land Press, Flagstaff, Arizona. 158 pp. $10.50.

This unconventional bibliography about one of the Southwest's great storytellers is sure to delight Green's many admirers and the friends he is certain to make in years to come. Wilson gives us more than the bare bones of bibliography although he does describe thoroughly Greer Green's books and other publications. He was a personal friend and includes much publication history, anecdotes, excerpts from reviews, and a section of Green obituaries. There are even quotations from Green's writings, and along the way we learn about variant bindings and boxes and a gaggle of those "points" dear to the hearts of collectors and bibliographers. There are plentiful illustrations of dust jackets, title pages and art work and a complete index.

Perhaps it is enough to say that this bibliography gave this reviewer almost as much pleasure as Green's own writings. He was a salty character and it shines through the pages.

The Cowgirls. By Joyce Gibson Roach. Cordovan Corporation, 5314 Bingle St., Houston, Texas 77092. 236 pp. price not given.

They were resilient, tough and resourceful. They were the gritty girls of the late 19th and early 20th century West who forsook the conventionally genteel role of most women of their day and traveled the trails, built herds, and ran ranches. They knew how to brand a steer and handle a gun, and there were even a few rustlers among them. And then there were the "cowgirls," the women who performed with the wild west shows beginning in the 1880s and with the later rodeos, performing in many of the same events as the men, although trick riding was often their specialty.

Although Lady Isabella Bird vacationed in Colorado and other parts of the West, and loved it, Amanda Burk became the "Cattle Queen of Cotulla" in Texas and wrote about it. Viola Slaughter of southeast Arizona is remembered as an ideal ranch wife. Her counterpart in the Holbrook country, Amelia Dunn, rode broncs with ease and snagged cows out of the mud; Sally Skull was an expert with firearms with a vocabulary, in English and Spanish, that would scald the hide off a horse.

A substantial portion of the book is given over to the wild west and rodeo performers, and there were an amazing lot of them. Lucille Mulhall, Tad Lucas Mabel Strickland and Ruth Roach were only three of the outstanding ones. Many later made it in the movies where they were generally overworked and underpaid in comparison to their cellu-loid sisters who batted their eyes and, clearly, hardly knew one end of a horse from another. The concluding chapter surveys the western heroine in fiction pretty stereotyped. But somehow neither the cowgirls nor the Zane Grey heroines are as interesting as their true life counterparts.

Joyce Roach presents us with a gallery of brief but vivid portraits of the spunky women of the West in a book that is cleanly and wittily written. It is a pleasure from start to finish.

The Anasazi, Prehistoric People of the Four Corners Region. By J. Richard Ambler. Photography by Marc Gaede. The Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1977. 50 pp. $3.00.

The ancient dwellers of the Four Corners region, where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet, left behind them, when they deserted the area in the late 13th century, a remarkable legacy of an astonishing advanced culture. These are the pueblo and cliff ruins visited annually by thousands of tourists. The record has been amplified by archaeologists through excavation and interpretation of the artifacts, the clothing, weapons, pottery and religious paraphernalia.

Other things, in considerable quantity, have been written about the Anasazi, as they are called, but perhaps the traveler, the beginning student and the general reader can find no better introduction to this fascinating area and its pre-Columbian inhabitants than this booklet issued by the Museum of Northern Arizona, which has studied it for many years. The text is authoritative and will help sort out the rather complex "phases" of the culture, and the many color illustrations clarify and amplify the written word.

(Inside back cover) Silent and untenable loom the battlements of the Superstitions in Arizona.

(Back Cover) Low water reveals a pleasing composition of natural form, texture and color. McDonald Creek, Glacier National Park, Montana. David Muench This issue: 35mm slides in 2" mounts, 1 to 15 slides, 40 each, 16 to 49 slides, 35¢ each, 50 or more, 3 for $1.00. Allow three weeks for delivery. Address: Slide Department, Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.

35mm COLOR SLIDES