Title: Colorado Governor Signs Animal Welfare Bills, Featuring Therapy Horse Jewel

Thursday was bill-signing day for animals in Colorado. Gov. Jared Polis signed measures addressing bison, wild horses, and animals threatened during emergencies, such as wildfires.

But the star of the day was Jewel, a 13-year-old American miniature horse who joined in the signing festivities at the CSU Spur at the National Western Stock Show grounds. According to her handler, she’d just had a bath and a good roll in the dirt and was ready for the rest of her day.

Jewel is a therapy horse, one of 14 housed at the Spur as part of its equine therapy program. Clients brush, groom, and handle Jewel for occupational, physical, and psychological therapy.

With Jewel at his side, Polis signed House Bill 25-1283, which continues the state’s efforts to help the Bureau of Land Management with Colorado’s wild horse population. Colorado’s efforts include fertility treatments rather than rounding them up and sending them to Cañon City. In the past, those roundups have led to outbreaks of equine influenza, which in 2022 killed 146 horses at the Cañon City facility.

The bill follows recommendations from a wild horse working group from 2023 and repeals the state-owned, nonprofit Wild Horse Project previously under the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Instead, the ag department will take on a more active role, including hiring eight professional "darters" who will administer contraceptives to wild horses to help reduce the population in the four BLM-controlled herd management areas and other parts of the state.

While the bill identifies gifts, grants, donations, and money from the federal government as the primary funding sources for the program, the General Assembly approved $1.5 million for the project in 2023, and it still has about $500,000 left.

Polis noted he’s been critical of the costly and sometimes inhumane federal roundups in the past. "We know if we have the ability as a state, we can do better" in successfully managing the population and in a less expensive way.

House Majority Leader Monica Duran, D-Wheat Ridge, said, "Wild horses embody the essence of Colorado." She added that HB 1283 represents extensive collaborative work involving diverse interests: ranchers, wild horse advocates, conservation groups, federal agencies, and state departments to address the complex challenge of managing these iconic animals. The bill was co-sponsored by House Assistant Minority Leader Ty Winter, R-Trinidad, and Sens. Janice Marchman, D-Loveland, and Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs.

Jewel got an invitation to visit the Capitol next year to provide a little therapy for lawmakers. According to her handler, she knows how to ride an elevator.

There is one other issue around the program: the transition in the federal government regarding who manages it. President Donald Trump’s first nominee for head of BLM, Kathleen Sgamma of Denver, withdrew her nomination after a memo surfaced in which she criticized Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.

Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term produced by the Heritage Foundation, addressed the wild horse program in a section on the Department of the Interior authored by William Perry Pendley, formerly a partner with Brownstein Farber Hyatt Shreck, LLP.

Pendley was acting BLM director of the Bureau in 2019 but was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate and his nomination was withdrawn a year later.

Pendley wrote of the wild horse program that in 2020, BLM reported to Congress it would expand adoptions and sales of horses gathered from overpopulated herds; increase gathers [captures] and increased capacity for off-range holding facilities and pastures; more effective use of fertility control efforts; and improved research, in concert with the academic and veterinary communities, to identify more effective contraceptive techniques and strategies.

But "all of that will not be enough to solve the problem. Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose of these animals humanely," Pendley wrote.

According to Polis and Sandra Hagen Solin of American Wild Horse Conservation, Colorado might see this as an opportunity, given the Trump administration’s cuts to funding and programs.

Polis told Colorado Politics on Thursday that he sees an opportunity for the state. The administration is looking for cost savings on roundups and horse boarding, he said. According to Solin, that can cost as much as $60,000 per year per horse.

The governor added that there’s an opportunity to save tens of millions of dollars per year and for BLM to work with states on this. "We are ready and willing to take on responsibility. We can do it more effectively and humanely."

Polis noted he’s talked to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burghum about the issue. "We’re ready to roll up our sleeves, save taxpayers money and be more proactive on management."

Solin told Colorado Politics that Burghum has been a fan of wild horses since his days as governor of North Dakota. The state is home to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and a wild horse herd believed to have descended from the horses of Sitting Bull.

"We actually feel like we have a friend in Burghum," Solin said. She acknowledged the Project 2025 report that indicated horses should be moved to slaughter, which she called "concerning," but said she had not heard that was a direction BLM was going to go. There are opportunities for cost savings in keeping horses on the range, and Burghum will be a protective force.

In a statement, AWHC said the U.S. government is spending over $150 million in taxpayer dollars on inhumane roundups that have led to the suffering and deaths of wild horses and burros, including far too many in Colorado. "The real tax savings come from keeping wild horses on the range instead of rounding them up in the first place."

Polis also signed bills to protect bison, allow residents of publicly financed housing to keep up to two pets instead of one; to prohibit the sale or adoption of animals on streets, highways, outdoors markets or parking lots; and to set up an animal protection fund with donations through income tax filings, to be administered by the ag department and that would help pay for care of pets and livestock during emergencies.