by Fran Jurga | 21 April 2010 | The Jurga Report at Equisearch.com

There’s no doubt that one of my favorite stories on this blog for 2009 was The Jurga Report‘s story of the renegade band of wild horses that was discovered running through the swamps of interior South Florida. Something about the story captured my imagination: maybe these so-called “wild” horses would stampede through Disney World, destroy a few golf courses with their hooves, or decide to graze on an airport runway and back up flights full of tourists. It sounded like jacket copy from a children’s book. “The ones that got away…”

And they did get away, for probably at least six months. No one knew how they got there, when they got there, or who put them there. They were just running free, even as I was writing about the real wild horses out west being rounded up and penned for life by the governmental logistics of the Bureau of Land Management.

It took the authorities time to lure them with food, but it worked eventually. The horses are now in custody, and since no one has come forward to claim them, reports say they will be auctioned off on Thursday.

I know the Sheriff had to go after them. They were running through the area’s water source, after all. That’s a lot of E. coli. And they could well have been carrying all sorts of diseases, or even be in need of medical care themselves.

There aren’t too many mysteries left in the horse world of the United States, but this little herd remains one of them. No doubt they’ll be split up and trucked off to new homes all over the USA. Isn’t that what you do with troublemakers?

But maybe some nights when the moon is full, the people who live in South Florida on the edge of the vast swamps will swear they hear the sound of thundering hooves and wonder if they’re out there again.

Or still.

Yes, the wild horses of South Florida may now just be a legend, but rumor has that a few got away…

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