Description

The Defiant Five

Some time ago, near Superior Wyoming, the Federal Bureau of Land Management began a large-scale round-up of wild horses from the Wyoming high plains. As part of a range management strategy, they intend to capture more than 4000 wild horses. Most will be put up for adoption.

The capture strategy it seems is to drive the wild horses with helicopters into large traps—wide V-shaped open fences that gradually narrow down into inescapable capture corrals.

Understandably, the round-up is highly controversial and emotionally charged on both sides. As for me, I love horses very much, but I also have a degree in Range management. So, I see both sides and make no judgement.

It seems that just a few days ago, the helicopter came upon a small band of wild horses and attempted to drive them into the trap. Writer Angus M. Thuermer Jr. described what happened,

“After being pushed by the helicopter for miles, the group charges away from the mouth
of the trap, splits apart, runs up a steep hillside and again regroups. It’s pushed back
toward the trap only to evade again and again, the aim of the herding pilot.”

Finally, the wranglers and the BLM called off the drive. The horses went free. So determined and intelligent was this group of horses in evading the trap that one observer, Lynn Hanson dubbed them, “The Defiant Five.” Hanson, wrote:

“The Defiant Five were chased up and down rocky hills and terrain for about an hour.
Every time they got near the trap site, the horses brilliantly split up and ran in different
directions.”

After I read that story, it kept coming back to me that there is a powerful lesson in the behavior of those wild horses. They are free and intelligently determined to stay that way. Somehow, with a wisdom they should not have, those five horses managed to evade cleverly concealed traps while so many of their herd-mates were captured and taken away, earning for themselves the
noble name of “The Defiant Five.”

Who are you and what are you about? Is your family so well prepared that no subtle trap of the Adversary can take them? Each one can see, discern, and comprehend his traps and snares and run away every time back to the family group? Have they been taught to recognize his ways?

It is my hope that you and yours are the Defiant Five, the Stubborn Six, the Noble nine, or whatever the number be. I want it to be so that my family proves also to be disturbers and annoyers of his kingdom. May it so be that every morning when your family and mine gets up, the devil says with dismay, “Oh no. They’re awake again.”

Source:

‘Defiant Five’ win temporary freedom in Wyoming wild horse roundup

Copyright Glenn Rawson 2022