NAVAJO NATION — A dead horse lay alongside Indian Route 12, just south of the Navajo Nation community known by old-timers as Ts’íhootso, good eating for a wild dog that scurried into the scrub as cars passed by.

It drew little notice. Whether live and meandering across roads in town centers, or dead from getting slammed by vehicles while grazing the reservation’s thin forage onto highway shoulders, feral horses have become a familiar part of the 27,000-square-mile nation’s high desert landscape — and a problem for the tribe’s emerging cattle ranching industry, according to Robert Joe, the Navajo Nation’s chief operating officer.

The Navajo Nation — a 17.5 million acre Indian reservation that stretches across portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico — is the largest coal-producing tribe in the U.S. Coal mining, oil, natural gas and the tribe’s massive coal-fired plant, the Navajo Generating Station, accounted for 66 percent of the tribe’s revenue in 2016 — down from as high as 77 percent in 2012.

With the pending shutdown of the plant in 2019 and the collapse of the coal market, the impoverished nation is being forced to look at new sources of wealth. A federal program established in 2009 by Congress shows some promise in raising cattle on the Padres Mesa Demonstration Ranch — a 640-acre swath of land on the reservation.

At about the same time, San Antonio-based Labatt Food Service was looking for markets for a new distribution center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Labatt CEO Blair Labatt and Chief Operating Officer Al Silva met with ranch manager Bill Inman and tribal officials to pitch a Navajo beef label that would allow Indian casinos to feature their own beef. It could be expanded to a Native American beef label as more tribes joined on.

The Navajo Beef label launched in November 2012. Labatt brought in a feed lot operator to fatten the cattle before slaughter and sent the meat off to its plants for processing. It also packaged, transported and a marketed the program, with pens and hats and posters featuring the label.

They processed 545 head of cattle that first year, generating more than $500,000 in revenue for the Navajos. Last year, the program processed 1,998 head of cattle that yielded $2.3 million in revenue for 23 Navajo ranching families. According to Labatt, the company is barely breaking even with its investment, though the label has helped the company make inroads in stocking other items for Navajo casinos.

“Really we view this as the biggest philanthropic effort that we’ve ever undertaken,” he said.

The nation’s sheer size alone, however, could make it a major contender in the niche beef market. Families with small herds could get a part of a label that’s already a star feature of casino restaurants and area supermarkets. For a place with a 44 percent unemployment rate, 7 percent graduation rate, and a $7,752 per capita income, the opportunity is hard to pass up.

But the program, which includes five ranch hands, breeding stock, inspections, and other operating expenses, cost the federal government about $67,000 last year. The ranch is facing funding pressure from the federal government and at risk of closing.

And grazing competition — a horse eats 1½ times more range than a cow — has become an issue for the Navajos now that the potential of marketing Native American beef is being realized.

Horses on the reservation have no natural predators, multiply prolifically, and eat up massive amounts of range. Amid an emotional debate that mirrors the national crisis over the exploding population of wild horses on federal lands, the Navajos haven’t been able to find a solution. Few are comfortable with the idea of killing them.

“It’s a real controversial issue with the Navajos, because of the Navajo culture and just the story of the horse, the sacredness of what it represents and how it’s integrated into the prayers and ceremonies,” Joe said. “So it’s a tough one. But at some point there has to be some controls and management that come into play. Because today, none of that exists.”

The wild horse population on federal lands has more than doubled in the past 16 years to more than 113,000 in 2016 with an additional 93,000 feral horses roaming on tribal lands throughout the U.S., according to a July report by the GAO. There are now at least 40,000 feral horses on the Navajo reservation, and that population is expected to double in the next five years, according to aerial surveys funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The population boom has been linked to the prohibitions against domestic horse slaughter. Congress has effectively banned horse slaughter since 2005 by withholding funding for federal inspectors necessary to approve the meat for human consumption. That means there hasn’t been domestic horse slaughter for more than a decade, which has given rise to a market for horses sent to Mexico for slaughter.

Exports for slaughter in Mexico increased 680 percent from 2006 to 2010, the GAO said. Separate measures to outlaw exporting horses for slaughter in Mexico and Canada have failed. A provision by President Donald Trump to save $10 million in Bureau of Land Management costs by selling wild horses has outraged animal rights groups.

“Without the ability to take their horses to a processing facility, owners have few options in how to deal with overpopulation or aging horses. This means horses are more likely to be abandoned or mistreated,” said Jeremy Fuchs of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

In the past, a down-on-his-luck Navajo could round up a horse or two, take it to a sale and net several hundred dollars. The horse meat would end up on dinner tables in parts of Europe and Asia, where it’s considered a delicacy. But exports have fallen after an animal welfare group called Animals’ Angels launched a campaign in 2013 in Europe releasing videos showing the brutality of horse slaughter and raising questions about the presence of veterinary drugs considered unsafe for humans in domestic horses sold for horse meat.

That’s led to a dramatic increase in horse carcasses in the Texas-Mexico border town of Presidio — from 12.5 tons in 2012 to 330 tons over the subsequent three years, the Express-News reported last year. Presidio is the end of the line for horses for which there was no market, in part because of the loss of the European customers.

With overpopulation of wild horses on federal lands, regulations against slaughter, and the aftermath of the Great Recession, horses in some places are more or less worthless.

“You can get a truckload of wild horses for, it’s heartbreaking, $150,” said Laura Leigh, founder of Nevada-based Wild Horse Education. “That truckload can pull in anywhere from $50 to $100,000 depending on the current price of horse meat. That’s a lot of cash.”

Gloria Tom, director of the Navajo Department of Fish and Wildlife, said leaders were considering a proposal for an approximately $950,000 multidisciplinary horse management plan. The plan includes an educational campaign about the horses’ effects on the environment, on-reservation livestock sales for off reservation buyers and controlled horse hunts.

“We want to be able to offer monetary incentives for people to get rid of their horses because basically they’re just out there on the landscape,” she said. “They’re not being used. They’re just there.”

The plan also includes contraceptive darts, she said, but only for people who have control over their areas.

“We’re talking about 18 million acres of land here,” she said. “I mean, if we had a small pasture and we knew what horse was darted, we’d be able to do something like that. But we’re talking about a large land base and it just wouldn’t be practical.”

In July, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, cast a pivotal vote opening the door for horse slaughter in the U.S. again. The legislation still needs to pass the Senate before it would become law, but it was the first indication in a while that Congress may reverse course on the practice.

“All of us would like to see wild horses and burros thrive in an ecologically balanced environment. But, this cannot happen unless the (Bureau of Land Management) has adequate means at hand to effectively manage horse and burro populations in an environmentally sensitive way,” Cuellar said in an email. “Due to this ban, the BLM has not been able to maintain horse populations at levels that protect wildlife habitat and enable multiple uses of land. Areas overpopulated by horses cannot sustain populations of wildlife. Ultimately, not only horses and burros themselves, but the entire ecosystem suffers.”

Cuellar added that he’s sponsored horse and burro adoption events in his district and saw that it wasn’t enough. Some horses considered successfully adopted have ended up in Mexican and Canadian packing plants, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Similarly, current sterilization and birth control efforts have proved ineffective at controlling the wild horse population, leaving many to face gruesome deaths due to starvation,” he said.

Leigh said that the move to reopen domestic horse slaughter was about cattle raisers looking to control forage on federal lands where they have grazing rights.

“This machine is moving really fast … to remove horses and put a bullet in their head,” she said. “Nobody comprehends that wild horse management is public land management, it’s attached to the federal grazing program … The federal grazing program is broken.”

Inman, a former Texas rancher and Bureau of Land Management employee, knows well how horses can eat up rangeland. But Navajos with horses have a feeling of wealth, he said, even if they don’t tend to the horses or know where they are.

Roundup attempts have ended with Navajos showing up to reclaim their “found” horses or letting them loose from the pens. Since reservation lands are collectively owned, the program will fail unless everyone’s on board with managing horse numbers, not grazing too many head of cattle and breeding for the best genetics.

During a drive up U.S. 191, which runs through the Navajo reservation up past the Utah border, Gene Shepherd, the first ranch hand hired at the Padres Mesa demonstration ranch, spoke of the many horse-vehicle collisions on the highway and the roundups by the Navajo Department of Agriculture that failed to fix the problem.

“I worked with them for three months,” he said. “Almost every day. But they didn’t even put a dent in ’em. They came underneath a lot of criticism. A lot of people lost their jobs.”

In the past few years, fencing has been put in along the state-managed roadway. In the winter months, what’s left of the grasses will get depleted, and desperate horses will try to get through the fences to try to reach the grass on the other side.

Shepherd is a soft-spoken man who speaks Navajo fluently and sings at spiritual ceremonies. He grew up herding sheep. Before the ranch, he worked odd construction jobs.

He slept in a horse trailer during the ranch’s earliest days, because the ranch house with all its snakes reminded him of the Mormon-run Indian boarding schools he’d escaped from in his youth. There aren’t many jobs on the reservation, so those who are employed either travel long distances or work for the government.

Inman has been fielding cellphone calls from the agency’s lawyers and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in an effort to save the ranch from losing its funding. When was the ranch started? How many acres was it? How much is it worth? How do we preserve it? How do we tear it down?

Labatt’s also visited with tribal leaders and Arizona Sen. John McCain to try to help save Padres Mesa. He’s hopeful Padres Mesa will be maintained under the tribe’s new Naatt’ánnii (Navajo for “leader”) Development Corporation if the federal government cuts off funding.

“The DC folks, if they come out here then it’s a pretty easy sell that we are very unique,” Inman said. “They have a little issue, I hear, because they’re like, ‘Who authorized a federal agency to start a ranch?’ Even though it’s great, the taxpayers’ money doesn’t usually go to buy cows. And they didn’t even know it really existed until this phase-out.”

lbrezosky@express-news.net