Blowing Up Dead Horses No Longer an Option for Wyoming Forest Rangers, Thanks to Climate Change

In the dry, fire-prone backcountry of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, U.S. Forest Service rangers have temporarily put an end to a controversial method of disposing of dead horses. Thanks to drought and rising temperatures combined to heighten the risk of wildfires, all thanks in large part to climate change, the carcasses of dead horses will no longer be exploded to prevent grizzly bears from hanging around their remains.

Rangers usually use this very delicate tactic of blowing a dead horse to smithereens to protect hikers. But recently, after two horses died on a steep trail near Cody, WY, officials decided to eschew the use of explosives to blow that dead horse straight to hell so they could cut down the risk of sparking a wildfire in the surrounding dry grass. The officials decided to move the carcasses downhill and reroute the trail, thus creating a wide buffer zone to cut down on bear encounters.

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The practice of exploding dead horses as a means of disposal has been around in Wyoming since 1995 where a manual with the hilariously straightforward title “Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives” details exactly how to obliterate animal carcasses with explosives. It’s a two-page manual that you can download right here. I highly recommend it.

The first page of the manual provides the reader with a picture of a horse that has long planks situated around its body. Those planks are explosives and the entire diagram is telling you where to best place those explosives to effectively obliterate the dead horse. In the case of Figure 1, where time is not a factor and the horse isn’t too big, the explosives should be placed under the horse in specific locations, like its torso, head, and legs.

Figure 2 goes comically overboard with the explosives. It’s exclusively for exploding horses in situations where it’s not practical to move it or when “total animal obliteration is necessary,” like when it keeled over and died in an area heavily trafficked by humans. In that case, nearly every bit of exposed horse is blanketed in explosives and blown to kingdom come.

As a side note, opening the link to the document I provided above will open it in a separate tab that is titled “fun stuff.” Downloading the document will bring up the “autosave” window that has a pre-filled-in name for the document. That name is “Boom-Boom-Boom.”