Ex-Wingate ag teacher: Longhorns not neglected

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — Trent Spencer, former agriculture teacher at Wingate High School, says he believes the whole story of the donation of Texas longhorns to the Navajo Nation is being blown way out of proportion.

“I think it’s more innocent than the papers say. But what made me mad was them saying that we didn’t feed and water them. That is absolutely not true,” he said in response to recent comments by Fritz Roanhorse from the Navajo Tribal Ranches Program who alleged that “the animals were starving and also had no water.”

“I fed them every day, my classes fed them every day, and then sometimes I did on the weekend. Sometimes the assistant principal came out and fed them,” said Spencer, who now works at Laguna Acoma High School.

He believes Navajo Nation Council Speaker Lawrence T. Morgan wanted to give the longhorns to the school and that the school would take them and do something with them. “The only reason they came and picked them up is because we called them and told them we didn’t want them,” he said.

When Texas billionaire B.J. “Red” McCombs donated the cattle to the Nation, he valued them at $10,000. “The value of them is way off. I don’t know where they came up with $10,000. I’d like to find somebody that would give me $10,000 for them,” Spencer said.

“When they first showed up here, you can’t imagine how young they were and how poor they were. You wouldn’t have given me $500 for all of them. Three or four of them were baby calves, one or two were older mamas, and one or two of them were like heifers, and there was one young bull. The bull wasn’t even hardly big enough to breed,” he said.

There were two reasons why he did not want them in the agriculture program. “We had two limousine cows and a full-bred Angus bull. We were raising show calves, and we didn’t have any cross fences. I was scared to death to turn them little longhorns and a bull out. We had like a 1,400 or 1,600-pound black bull out there and I didn’t want him to hurt them, that’s the first thing.

“The second thing was they never turned them over to the school. We’re a federal school. We couldn’t buy food for them legally unless they were property of the school. They never came up with any kind of documentation to us.”

The Navajo Nation provided food for the longhorns “and they were good about it,” he said. Whenever they needed hay, the principal would call the Nation and someone would bring it out right away. “And I’m telling you from the bottom of my heart, they never went one minute without feed or water. That is absolutely a lie.”

Charles Long had just begun working for the speaker’s office when the longhorns were donated. “That was my first assignment,” he said Monday. “The initial purpose for the contribution was that the longhorns would be given to schools that have agriculture programs and they would study the longhorns for breeding purposes and whatever else that their programs do. It was my understanding that Fort Wingate would be the first school, and they had a good program.”

But several weeks after the cows were delivered, he said they were notified that the school’s agriculture program was closing down because of lack of interest. Also, he said, they were notified by BIA Realty that they couldn’t keep the longhorns there because of federal law. So Navajo Department of Agriculture, under the direction of John Blueyes, was able to locate a home for them on a tribal ranch leased by John Berry.

Morgan said Berry had them branded with the Bar N brand on the advice of the Department of Agriculture. “Agriculture is right now shrugging it off — ‘No, they weren’t doing that.’ That’s B.S.,” Morgan said.

Also, if there weren’t any potential benefits to having the longhorns, he wouldn’t have accepted them, he said.

“Those are pedigrees — the bloodline. Just like racehorses, they can sell well if they keep up with the bloodline. That’s what I had in mind.”

There is also the potential that any Navajo rancher can start buying frozen sperm from the longhorns and implant them, he said. “That’s what they’re doing now nationally.

They’re doing that for bucking bulls. They go into thousands (of dollars). Even the mother cows are worth a lot of money.

“These longhorns are not for consumption — like the media said, ‘Where’s the beef?’ They are for educational purposes. Agriculture just needs to come up with a simple — not lengthy — just a simple three criteria, and then give them out.

“They belong to the Navajo government and the Navajo government has to take care of them,” he said.

Long added that there is no truth to the rumor that McCombs wanted to give the longhorns to the Navajo Nation so they would be given the opportunity to develop Lake Powell.