The Great Grand Canyon Burro Rescue
They came by hoof, they left by helicopter.
In the early 1980s, an animal rights group airlifted nearly 600 wild burros out of Grand Canyon National Park. The media ate it up – magazines sold full-page ads advertising the cause and families from the East Coast clamored to adopt the rescued animals.
A helicopter raises a burro high into the air, during the Grand Canyon burro rescue of 1980. (NPS photo by David Sharrow)
But conflict around wild burros in the West still exists today. What does one of the flashiest rescue stories of the last century tell us about the power of animal activism to make enduring change?
Featuring Rebbel Clayton, Abbie Harlow, John MacPete, Dave Sharrow, Travis Ericsson, and Eric Claman.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
You can read Abbie Harlow’s paper, “The Burro Evil” here.
If you’re interested in learning more about the burro adoption process, Cynthia Brannigan outlined her experience as an employee for the Fund for Animals in her book “The Last Diving Horse in America.” Research for this episode was also sourced from Julie Hoffman Marshall’s Making Burros Fly and Cleveland Amory’s Ranch of Dreams.
Black Beauty Ranch currently houses more than 600 animals. You can read more about their work here.
Check out dozens of archival shots from the rescue, via Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library.
And yes, you can watch Brighty of the Grand Canyon on Youtube.
SUPPORT
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Kate Dario
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by BlueDot Sessions.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Special thanks to: June McGinley Camp, Sue Tygielski, Cynthia Brannigan, Jay Abbott, Janet Balsom, Wayne Pacelle, Colin Pena, Max and Amy Loui. Archival materials sourced from the Museum Collection at Grand Canyon National Park and the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Rebbel Clayton was starting fifth grade in Wikieup, Arizona. Her school was tiny; just three teachers for the entire building.
Rebbel Clayton: So it’s a little dirt road that goes down to our little school, and there's only about like 35 kids in it.
Nate Hegyi: This was 1980 – no internet, barely any computers. But her teachers had ways of keeping students connected.
Rebbel Clayton: We would get the Weekly Readers, which are like little two page newspapers that would have like the news from the Times with a big picture.
Nate Hegyi: Rebbel’s teacher passed out that week’s issue.
Rebbel Clayton: And there was my dad… with a baby burro.
[MUSIC IN, Highway 430]
Nate Hegyi: A baby burro. Now, for those of you who don’t know what that is - it’s another name for a donkey. In the photo, Rebbel’s dad is sitting on a horse. The baby burro is draped across his saddle. And behind him: the steep walls of the Grand Canyon and a helicopter, hovering above.
It is an epic shot. One that also landed in The New York Times.
Rebbel Clayton: And I was like, oh my word, the whole United States is getting this picture of this… And it was just a weird thing knowing this was my life.
[MUX swell and then FADE]
Nate Hegyi: This photo… this “weird thing” Rebbel experienced... …people have called it “the toughest animal rescue of the century.” It hinged on a Vietnam War pilot, a whole bunch of A-list celebrities, and a crazy plan to save some 500 burros from death. But, whether this rescue was worth it ... well that's a more complicated story.
Milford Fletcher ARCHIVAL: There's plenty of adequate protection for these animals. They do not belong in the national parks.
Cleveland Amory ARCHIVAL: We gotta even change the language. You pig, you skunk, you weasel, you jackass.
Dave Sharrow: It's a never ending problem. I… I don't see a good solution out there.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi. Today… one of the flashiest, most hair-brained rescue stories of the last century… and what it tells us about the power of animal activism to make enduring change. Our producer, Marina Henke, is going to take the rest of the story from here.
[MUX UP and out]
PRE-ROLL
Marina Henke: It was the 1970s, and the Grand Canyon National Park Service had a wild burro problem. But, they had a plan.
Abbie Harlow: Arm the park rangers, send them deep into the canyon, shoot the animals and leave the bodies.
Marina Henke: That was the plan. And, this is Abbie Harlow. She’s a PHD candidate at Arizona State University who studies the history of wild burros. And, she’s reading one of the most gripping openings to an academic paper I’ve ever heard. It was her masters thesis.
Abbie Harlow: If all went according to plan, every feral burro in Grand Canyon National Park would be dead by the summer of 1980.
Marina Henke: I first came across the story Abbie’s about to tell when I was in high school – I was writing an extra credit paper about the history of the National Park Service (total dork, I know). And, I saw a picture of a burro dangling hundreds of feet in the air from a helicopter. I’ve never been able to shake it… But I’m getting ahead of myself.
[MUSIC, Kickstep IN]
Marina Henke: Burros first came to North America in the 16th century with the Spanish. But, the Grand Canyon burro population didn’t really pick up until the 1800s. Prospectors looking for gold and silver walked the burros in … and then left them there when they moved on.
Abbie Harlow: The ones left behind just proliferated in the canyon.
Marina Henke: Burros were made for a canyon environment: great balance, short legs, tiny hooves that could squeeze between rocks. So, when a tourist economy picked up a few years later, the burros were a natural source of labor. They hauled guests, carried materials for new trails.
Abbie Harlow: And for decades that was the way that a lot of people experienced as far as going into the canyon… it was on a burro back
[MUX HITS AT GUITAR NOTE - rides and then fades out]
Marina Henke: None of this was considered a problem. The burros seemed happy… and so did the people riding them. That is, until 1919 - when the Grand Canyon was designated a National Park.
Milford Fletcher ARCHIVAL: The National Parks are set up to provide little vignettes, little pictures of primitive America.
Marina Henke: When Congress established the National Park Service… they argued that this new system would protect an undisturbed vision of America… well before ‘European man.’And the burros? Remember, they’d been brought by ‘European man.’ The Park Service slapped them with a new classification: “exotic species.”
Milford Fletcher ARCHIVAL : And we firmly believe that our policy on removal of exotics is correct. And it doesn't matter how many there are, we want them out of the national parks.
Abbie Harlow: In their mind, an exotic species is the same thing as human involvement.
Marina Henke: To the Park Service, having feral burros in the Grand Canyon was like building a house on the side of Mount Rainier. Laying a highway right through Yosemite. Nevermind that Indigenous populations had already used and altered North America for centuries – they actively lived, and STILL live, all across the Southwest.
Abbie Harlow: They want them to be this image of nature undisturbed by man. I mean Native Americans were using the environment, they were changing it, they were altering it for their use just as every human group has done.
Marina Henke: As, if the new exotic species label wasn’t enough, the burros also had another problem. They were losing their jobs as pack animals for tourists. Turns out that mules, the offspring of a burro and a horse, were better suited for schlepping guests down the canyon.
Abbie Harlow: They take on all of the best characteristics of both parents…
Marina Henke: Big like horses, sturdy like burros.
Abbie Harlow: Today they are the the only, um, pack animal that the National Park Service uses at the canyon.
Marina Henke: So, in 1924 the Park Service started hiring hunters to shoot burros.
[MUX, Brer Spine IN]
Abbie Harlow: And they're allowed to do whatever they want with them. Sometimes they sell them for meat, sometimes they just leave them.
Marina Henke: The Park Service wasn’t alone in this type of practice. The culling of horses and burros was happening all over the West around this time. And, park management believed they were doing this in SERVICE of tourists. In their minds: the burros were an eyesore that just didn’t belong.
[MUX UP]
Marina Henke: But these animals had something special going for them. Something that humans have a hard time ignoring.
Abbie Harlow: They're cute!
[QUICK MUX BEAT]
Abbie Harlow: They have this comically big head and big ears. They're usually very calm.
Marina Henke: And then, there’s the braying.
[MUX & BRAYING NOISE PEAKS AND FADES]
Marina Henke: These cute animals, with big heads and big ears who lived in a big, beautiful canyon, were easy to love. And in the 1950s, they got a celebrity mascot.
[MUX: Brighty Movie Theme IN]
Marina Henke: When children’s book artist Marguerite Henry visited the Grand Canyon, she learned about a real-life local legend – a burro named Brighty.
Abbie Harlow: Brighty the burro was a burro that lived in the Grand Canyon in the late 19th century, early 20th century. And he was well known around the Grand Canyon, um, because he was pretty friendly for a feral burrow. He'd wander into camps, he’d play with kids.
Marina Henke: Marguerite took these stories, and turned them into a children’s book. Brighty of the Grand Canyon was published in 1953. And, the movie came around ten years later.
Prospector: You ain’t a devil at all, you’re an angel. Bright Angel. I’m going to call you Brighty for short! (CONTINUES TO FADE UNDER, COMES BACK UP AFTER NEXT GRAF)
Marina Henke: Brighty helps find gold, avenges a prospector’s death, and also befriends Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, Brighty sort of convinces him to protect the canyon.
Theodore Roosevelt: When I get back to Washington I’m to see what can be done about making this a National Park! This wonder of nature must be kept exactly as it is now.
Marina Henke: In Marguerite’s telling, Brighty wasn’t just a burro who happened to live in the Grand Canyon. He was PART of the Grand Canyon.
Narrator: Brighty has long since left this earth. But some animals like some men leave a trail of glory behind. They give their spirit to the place where they have lived, a part of the rocks, and the streams, the wind and the sky. Brighty’s spirit lives on, forever wild, forever free.
[MUX: Brighty Theme peaks and fades out]
Marina Henke: The book was a huge hit. And, the Park Service took advantage of its popularity. They installed a statue of Brighty at the visitors center. The gift shop even sold copies of Marguerite’s book. And at the exact same time - rangers were still picking off burros inside the Park - over just about 40 years they’d killed more than 2,000 of them. The problem they saw it, of burros as an exotic species hadn't gone away.
Abbie Harlow: So this is the same time that you're getting increased professionalism in the National Park Service. The people now working for the National Park Service are ecologists, and study environmentalism, they have to go in and do studies and figure out exactly what their choices are… are impacting.
Marina Henke: And the burros were having an impact. Rangers had seen burro trails crop up all over the park. They were fouling water sources, creating huge dust pits around popular archaeological sites…
Abbie Harlow: But the biggest complaint and the biggest concern from the very beginning is that burros eat the same food as bighorn sheep. And desert bighorn sheep are a native animal. It's believed they're much more desirable to look at and to have in the canyon. So if it's between sheep and burros, the burros have to go.
Marina Henke: In 1976, the Park Service made the announcement: they would shoot all remaining Grand Canyon burros. This wasn’t population control. It was planned eradication.
[MUX, Convoy Lines Minimal IN]
Marina Henke: Now… so far, the public hadn’t been all that vocal about the thousands of burro killings. But that was about to change. Because while the Park Service was getting more professional, so had the animal welfare organizations. These were groups like the American Horse Protection Association, The Humane Society.
Abbie Harlow: This is the rise of the activists that would eventually lead to the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act that passes in ‘71.
Marina Henke: The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act prohibited the killing of wild horses and burros on public lands. With one important exception: National Parks. The Act had prompted a wave of equine activism... And now… the public was hearing that the government planned to shoot hundreds of burros.
Abbie Harlow: This generation in the 60s grew up with Brighty as this adorable burro living in the canyon. Not only the younger kids, but also their parents are like, wait, they're going to shoot Brighty?
[MUX swell and fade]
Marina Henke: The story continued to balloon in the public. And, it didn’t take long for the letters to arrive.
Archival Letter, Middle-Age Woman: After listening to our local TV station in regards to the destruction of the harmless burros in the Grand Canyon, I am sending this letter of protest.
Marina Henke: Over the course of a couple months, nearly 12,000 pieces of mail came to the Grand Canyon superintendent's office.
Archival Letter Child: Dear Mr. Stitt. I love all animals. I want to help all animals in danger! I have a shirt that says protect… (FADES UNDER)
Marina Henke: From all across the country, people weren’t just protesting, they were offering solutions.
Archival Letter Child: If the burros cause destruction in the Grand Canyon, move them to a safe place!
Marina Henke: One of those letters was from a boy named John MacPete: perfect cursive, some endearing spelling errors.
John MacPete Child: If they want to save the sheep and not kill the burros they could catch the sheep and take them elsewhere in the Grand Canyon (FADES UNDER)...
Marina Henke: It was postmarked from the suburbs of Chicago. I made some calls.
John MacPete: Hello?
Marina Henke: Hey, is this John MacPete?
John MacPete: Yes…
Marina Henke: My name is Marina Henke. (STARTS TO FADE UNDER) I gave you a call a couple of days ago… so I think and I might be wrong, but you might have written a letter (FADES DOWN)
Marina Henke: When I got in touch with him, John had no recollection of the Grand Canyon burros (he later confirmed with his dad that, yes, this was his childhood handwriting, addressed from his home city). I gave John the Sparknotes version: exotic species, Brighty, the campaign against the shootings.
John MacPete: Oh, I love it. That's great.
Marina Henke: Sounds like maybe you'd write the letter now, you know.
John MacPete: Yeah, absolutely. I love animals, and I… I definitely think if there's any way to avoid, you know, shooting them, then... yeah, we ought to do it.
Marina Henke: The National Park Service had just walked into a massive PR problem. Rangers moved the Brighty statue to storage. They replaced it with a science display chart outlining the burro problem.
Marina Henke: Meanwhile, the pro-burro contingents wanted better proof. The Horse Protection Association demanded that the Park Service write up a huge report: outlining the animal’s impact on the Canyon, and looking beyond lethal solutions.
Marina Henke: The Park Service complied. They investigated other options: sterilization programs, herding the burros out of the canyon on foot.
[MUX, DurnaVilla IN]
Marina Henke: Why not give them to Mexico? One letter had asked. So, the Park Service reached out to Mexico. And Mexico wrote back.
Dr. Ortiz: Sr. Jim Walters, De acuerdo con la conversación sostenida en Las Cruces… (FADES UNDER)
Marina Henke: “We aren’t interested in receiving your feral burros” they wrote. Oh and, by the way, we’ve noticed some burro problems in Baja, California, and you should expect to hear from us soon...
Dr. Ortiz: (FADES UP) Dr. Antonio Landazuri Ortiz… (FADES UNDER)
Marina Henke: The Navajo tribe declined, the Hopi, the Havasupai. It was no, after no, after no. And in 1979, the Park Service released a report that did not look promising for the burros.
Abbie Harlow: They say this is why we can't sterilize them. This is why we can't round them up. This is why we can't leave them.
Marina Henke: It mostly came down to money. The original plan to shoot the burros would cost about $56,000 dollars. Every other plan was way, way, WAY more expensive.
Abbie Harlow: This is why the only option is to kill the burros.
Marina Henke: But then, in a moment that feels so shockingly… I don’t know… cooperative?... the Park Service added one caveat. If a private group came forward with the resources… those people could save the burros. The hitch? They only had 60 days.
Abbie Harlow: And they sent it to everyone that could possibly have an opinion and that's when they hear from Cleveland Amory and the Fund for Animals.
[BEAT]
Marina Henke: That’s after a short break.
[MUX OUT]
MIDROLL
Marina Henke: This is Outside/In, I’m Marina Henke. The Park Service had just handed over the fate of the Grand Canyon burros to the public. And the man who answered the call was named Cleveland Amory.
Abbie Harlow: Cleveland Amory is a animal advocate and author and personality (laughs).
Marina Henke: Again, this is historian Abbie Harlow. While reporting this story, whenever I asked people about Cleveland, their responses were similar. “That guy? He was a character.”
Cleveland Amory ARCHIVAL: Now let's talk turkey if I can use one of your expressions.
Marina Henke: He was a man of many patterns: plaid suit, checkered shirt, bright red tie.
Cleveland Amory ARCHIVAL: You know… sure shooting, square shooting, fire away! We gotta even change the language. You pig, you weasel, you skunk, you jackass.
Marina Henke: Cleveland came from money. Upper class Boston family, boarding school, Harvard, eventually a career in journalism and television.
Marina Henke: But his real passion was animal activism. In 1967 he started the Fund for Animals, an advocacy group that would raise money for the neediest animal rights cases. Armed with a Rolodex of movie star friends – Cleveland could raise money fast.
News Reporter ARCHIVAL: Of course I understand your taking out ads in magazines like Look…
Marina Henke: Here’s Cleveland being interviewed about an anti-fur coat initiative. He was a master at using celebrities to his advantage – some argue that the Fund for Animals was really what kicked off this now quite normal phenomenon.
Cleveland Amory ARCHIVAL: … This is the last issue of Look magazine, and it shows 5 members of our national board: Doris Day, Amanda Blake, Jane Meadows, Angie Dickinson, and Mary Tyler Moore there at the bottom. And they say not only don’t wear fur coats, they say it’s again God’s law and a sin (FADES UNDER).
Marina Henke: By the 70s, the Fund had started to make waves. They’d gotten The Price is Right to ban fur coats on their prize list, saved a bunch of baby seals off the coast of Canada.
Marina Henke: Cleveland was a savvy marketer. He knew the kinds of things that could make a lot of people care. So, when he heard word of burros about to be killed in the Grand Canyon?
Abbie Harlow: He saw that this was something that people were fired up about, and he wanted to find a way to save them.
[MUX, Brer Spine IN]
Marina Henke: When an employee asked Cleveland, “Are you willing to spend $280,000 to rescue 400 donkeys from a bloody great hole in the ground?” His answer was yes. It would end up costing almost twice that. To raise the funds, Cleveland hired a Manhattan based ad agency – Young & Rubicon. These were big shots, with clients like Xerox, Lays, BandAid.
Abbie Harlow: One of his most, um… famous ads that really got people to pull out their pocketbooks was a full page ad that was a picture of him holding a little baby burro, and at the bottom it says, if you turn this page, this burro will be killed.
Marina Henke: Like I said, savvy.
Abbie Harlow: And it works. They want to save the burros. So they donate. They want their own burro. So they donate.
Marina Henke: Oh yeah – Cleveland promised that if you donated… you might just get to adopt one of the rescued burros. Money started coming from all across the country – especially from out East.
Abbie Harlow: Amory says you can own a piece of the Grand Canyon. And so for someone on the East Coast that seems so… so much more exciting than someone, say, in Arizona.
Marina Henke: But actually pulling the rescue off? The Fund for Animals described their plan as “the toughest animal rescue operation in history.” It was a logistical nightmare.
Abbie Harlow: The one thing, possibly the only thing that was going to work was to corral them within the canyon, kind of bunch them up as much as possible and then rope ‘em, tie ‘emup, and airlift them out under a helicopter.
Marina Henke: Is this, like, as theatrical as it sounds?
Abbie Harlow: Absolutely.
[MUX UP and OUT]
Marina Henke: Despite its name, the Grand Canyon is actually made up of many canyons – which meant countless nooks for burros to hide, and constantly shifting terrain. There were places a helicopter couldn’t even reach, so some burros would have to first be corralled onto a boat, and floated down the Colorado River to a flatter pick-up spot. AND, per the Park Service’s order, the rescue would start in August. Temperatures could reach as high as 120 degrees during the day.
Marina Henke: So Cleveland went out looking for the best of the best. One of the helicopters would be operated by a Vietnam vet named Chopper Dan. And then there was Dave Ericsson, running the ground operation.
National Finals Rodeo ARCHIVAL: Live from Oklahoma city! (FADES UNDER)
Marina Henke: Dave was Rebbel Ericsson’s dad – he was the guy on the cover of the magazine we mentioned at the beginning of this episode. Dave was a true cowboy… ran a ranch in Arizona, competed in rodeos across the country.
Marina Henke: Helping run logistics for the National Park Service was another Dave – Dave Sharrow.
Dave Sharrow: I started with the Grand Canyon National Park in April of 1980.
Marina Henke: Dave’s job was to make sure everything ran smoothly. But from the get go, things got complicated. The boat plan worked, but – this idea to herd most of the animals out of the hills onto flatter ground?
[MUX, Crumbtown, IN]
Dave Sharrow: It didn't work very well… because a lot of the burros said, no, I'm not going out there on the flat where you can rope me. I'm going to hang out up here in the rough country.
Marina Henke: So, the cowboys started roping them in the rough country. They used the helicopters to help herd the animals. Dave Sharrow sat in the passenger's seat for a lot of this.
Dave Sharrow: And we tried all sorts of things.
They’d throw rocks at them. Make loud noises. One of the pilots brought a box of firecrackers with him one day – cherry bombs.
Dave Sharrow: So he would reach in the box, would get a cherry bomb, light it on his cigarette and throw it out the window at the burros.
[BRIEF MUX BEAT]
Marina Henke: That didn’t work either. So the cowboys started roping burros from inside the chopper. They’d lasso them from the air, tie the other end of the rope to an anvil, and then throw it out onto the canyon bottom at the last second.
Dave Sharrow: And the burro would take off, and the anvil would get hung up in the rocks, cowboys jump out, go over and knock the burro down, tie it up, put it in the sling and fly it out.
[MUX UP]
Marina Henke: Meanwhile, Rebbel and her brother Travis – he was only about 4 at the time – were in the helicopters that were taking the burros to the canyon rim.
Travis Ericsson: I can remember looking down on the helicopter because they'd be swinging back and forth. Right?
Marina Henke: Travis would sometimes throw up in the helicopter. Chopper Dan didn’t love that.
Travis Ericsson: So he says, all right, I'm going to drop you off right here in this butte in the middle of the canyon.
Marina Henke: A butte – think typical Southwestern mesa but even taller.
Travis Ericsson: I got me a pinecone, and I dropped it off the edge, and I eventually couldn't see it anymore. And that's when I went screaming. You know what I mean? I was like, “oh, my God, I'm gonna die out here.”
Rebbel Clayton: And we just literally sat on a rock and like waited to hear the helicopter again.
Marina Henke: But they didn’t die out there. And one by one - the burros got loaded up and airlifted to the rim of the canyon.
Dave Sharrow: And the burros, something about being roped and thrown in helicopter sling and flown out of Grand Canyon seemed to be like a religious experience for these burros. Because they got up to the corrals up on the rim and they were just like pets, I mean, docile, you could walk up and put your arm around them.
[MUX swell and OUT]
Marina Henke: The way that Travis, Rebbel, and Dave Sharrow describe the rescue – it’s like this story was artificially generated in a lab to make headlines. And… it did .
TV Announcer ARCHIVAL: The Grand Canyon project, thought to be impossible… was one of the hottest animal rescues in history.
Abbie Harlow: There's media around, there's pictures… people are following this story.
Marina Henke: The Fund for Animals even created a promotional calendar with photos from the rescue. It was called “On Burro’d Time.” Get it?
Marina Henke: By the end of 1981, the Fund had airlifted 577 burros from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Estimates put the total price tag for the project at about $2 million by today’s standard. For a whole lot of money, the Grand Canyon burros had been saved.
[MUX, Haena IN]
Marina Henke: By the end of the 1980s, Park Rangers officially declared the Grand Canyon burro problem a “low priority.”
Marina Henke: Today, there’s few reports of burros in the canyon. The foot trails are gone, and the bighorn sheep populations are fairly strong – although the Park Service never definitively tied this to the burro’s expulsion.
Marina Henke: By those measures, the Grand Canyon burro rescue was a resounding success. But, success stories are rarely simple. Besides the burros themselves – what was saved in the Grand Canyon? Is it the job of a rescue to save anything but its subject?
[MUX swell and fade]
Marina Henke: After the Fund finished their work, they didn’t actually have a spot for the burros to go, so Cleveland Amory purchased 83 acres of land in Murchinson, Texas. He called it Black Beauty Ranch, named after yet another beloved children's book character.
Marina Henke: Most of the burros went there soon after the rescue. But some of them did, in fact, get adopted. They were driven up the East Coast in truckloads.
Eric Claman: These, these guys were incredibly approachable… I just remember, if you come with carrots or apples. It was, it was… it was like bees to honey.
Marina Henke: This is Eric Claman. Eric’s Dad, Allyn, loved taking care of his foster burros in small town Connecticut. That summer, people called him “the Donkey Man.”
Eric Claman: These donkeys were like him and a dog. He just… he loved them and he would just hang out sometimes. And you know, I think I caught him talking to him once in a while
Marina Henke: Just as advertised by the Fund, owning a little slice of the Grand Canyon made Allyn Claman feel like he was part of something bigger. And for the burros, life seemed good.
Eric Claman: You know, this is not a bad life. Someone's bringing you a carrot. Doesn’t suck.
Marina Henke: The animals spread across the country. A couple of the burros wound up with Travis and Rebbel Ericsson – the cowboy’s kids.
Rebbel Clayton: He would get up in the window, like, at 6:00 in the morning and bray to come out with a bottle (siblings laugh).
Marina Henke: There were some babies, and an older one.
Travis Ericsson: We'd ride it bareback, you know what I mean? So, like, my sisters and all of them would ride it. And anytime you got it going faster than a good jog, it would put its head down and throw us off. And my dad would get quite a kick out of that.
[MUX, Checkered Blue IN]
Marina Henke: I imagine the path of these burros kinda like a relay race… each group handing them off like a baton. But the symbol of that baton changing with each leg: first an undeniable part of the Grand Canyon, then a defenseless animal, finally… living proof of a good deed.
Marina Henke: I spent a not insubstantial amount of time trying to find the descendants of these animals. Turns out the Fund sterilized most of them. So, any living legacy of the burros has likely all died out. Cleveland argued that the rescue made the Park Service recognize the power of public opinion. And the Park Service no longer jumps to lethal solutions as a first response to population control. But – the burro question is far from settled.
[MUX fade]
Marina Henke: Immediately after the Grand Canyon rescue ended, the Fund for Animals helped support a rescue attempt in Death Valley, a nearby National Park. But the scope of the problem was totally different. This was big, wide terrain, no canyons in sight. And the burro population was nearly 6000. Too many to rescue – and way too many to adopt.
Dave Sharrow: You can sort of solve the Grand Canyon problem because I think compared to the scale of the rest of the West, it's a small problem.
Marina Henke: Again, this is Dave Sharrow, the Park Service employee who’d helped with the rescue. He says, wild burros are still an issue in other National Parks.
Dave Sharrow: It's a never ending problem. I, I, I don't see a good solution out there.
(MUX, Golden Grass, IN)
Abbie Harlow: Even with a limited population in the Grand Canyon, we're still dealing with feral burros in Death Valley, in Mojave… we’re still dealing with this grasp of how is this animal federally protected in some land and being actively shot in other lands? So it's this idea that just because the Grand Canyon had a happy ending, it's… the story is far from over.
Marina Henke: Animal activism and wildlife management are two very different things. Even during the height of the burro controversy, some conservation groups raised this very concern. Organizations like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society argued that dumping resources into a rescue, one that pulled on the heartstrings of the public – was the wrong idea. Teaching kids that the real world looked like Bambi’s forest, or maybe more accurately – Brighty’s canyon – didn’t have any scientific basis. They claimed it was a case of “Disney-ification.”
Park Service Employee ARCHIVAL: It looks like a pet, and it has big brown eyes and furry ears. And it's cute. Frankly, it's very cute and it's very intelligent.
[MUX swell and fades]
Marina Henke: When I spoke with John MacPete – who, as a kid, wrote that letter of protest to the Park Service –
Child John MacPete: If they want to save the sheep and not kill the burros… (FADES UNDER)
Marina Henke: I asked him how he felt about the issue today.
Marina Henke: Yeah. I mean, and I guess, you know, I mean, can I ask you a bit of a hypothetical question with that? Like it took a lot of money to save these, these burrows, like, honestly, like hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this. Do you still think now you would say, like, they should do this? They should spend all this money to save these animals?
John MacPete: Well, I guess… I guess the, the question that I have is, why do they need to be moved in the first place? In other words, you're only saving the animals because somebody made the decision that they had to go. But why did they have to go?
Marina Henke: John’s pushing 60. He’s a lawyer in Texas, and still donates to animal advocacy groups. And I have to say, it was a surreal moment to debate the Grand Canyon burro problem with this guy – someone who, as a kid, had written a letter that was SO black and white. It’s the currency of many animal rights campaigns – this clear right and wrong. For the Park Service it had never been that simple.
John MacPete: You know, and obviously, I guess what this tells us, what, 40, 47 years later is that, um, you know, maybe they had a really good reason, like we just talked about, but they didn't handle their public relations very well. And obviously, you know, if the story that gets out is just the federal government is going to murder donkeys, it's easy to get people who love animals to say no, like, you shouldn't do that, and, and force them to, to change course just because of the public relations problem.
Marina Henke: Yeah. I mean, does it almost make you wonder if like … or maybe wish that like a, a nine year old you would have gotten presented with like all the facts?
John MacPete: Yeah.
[MUX, Vine Crawler, IN]
Marina Henke: It’s hard to pinpoint the ripple effects of the burro rescue – there was no “Brighty Act” passed, no official legislation. To the critics, it might feel like putting a bandaid on a gaping wound. But to many activists it just feels like they’re doing what they can. 577 burros saved is 577 burros not killed. Back in the Grand Canyon, the Fund continued to remove a few stragglers even after the summer of 1981. But, after a few years, Dave Sharrow remembers the Fund was looking to wrap things up.
Dave Sharrow: You know, they had spent as much money as they wanted to spend, and they, you know, they wanted to declare success and move on.
Marina Henke: Unlike a wildlife management plan, the nature of a rescue is to have a beginning, a middle and, importantly, an end.
Dave Sharrow: So after that what would happen is, if we heard about them, we'd send out, um, a couple of rangers, um, with rifles to shoot the burrows.
Marina Henke: These days, the Brighty statue still stands at the Grand Canyon Visitor’s center. As legend goes, it means good luck if you rub his nose. It’s actually become shiny over time. Yet again, Brighty has become a different kind of symbol.
[MUX UP and FADES]
[MUX, Sea Dance IN]
Nate Hegyi : This episode was reported, produced and mixed by Marina Henke. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. I’m your host, Nate Hegyi.
Nate Hegyi: Fun fact, I was once camping outside of Las Vegas when I heard this screaming and I was wondering what it was. Turns out? It was a burro.
Nate Hegyi: Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Kate Dario. Rebecca Lavoie is our head of on-demand audio. Special thanks to: June McGinley Camp, Sue Tygielski, Cynthia Brannigan, Jay Abbott, Janet Balsom, Wayne Pacelle, Colin Pena, Max and Amy Loui. Archival materials sourced from the Museum Collection at Grand Canyon National Park and the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research. Check out the show notes for more pictures and information about the Grand Canyon burro rescue. Abbie Harlow’s full paper on the rescue is a great read. You can find that and several books chronicling the Fund for Animal’s legacy there as well. Music from Blue Dot sessions. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of NHPR.