Goshen 14 Update: Fourteen Horses, System Gaps, and a Preventable Crisis

Some of you may be aware of a horse-hoarding/neglect situation in Goshen Countythat was reported in late 2025. The horses were put on a 30-acre parcel outside Lingle in the Fall, thenleft to fend for themselves. According to local gossip, this was a recurrent pattern by the owner, Nathan Michael Wallman.

Lesson Learned: Horse hoarding occurs in Wyoming. It is a complex form of animal cruelty involving the accumulation of more horses than can be properly cared for. This can result in neglect, malnutrition, and illness, often by the owner's delusional belief that he or she is saving them. There may be more to this in Wallman’s case. He also appears to be a con man, given his past court history.

When WYCAP was contacted about this in November 2025, winter was coming on and several of the fourteen were already in poor condition. There was limited shelter on the hillside where they grazed. The pasture was, without exaggeration, reduced to dirt and a few yucca plants. Access to water was precarious, since the water trough was unheated and only one horse could drink at a time. When it froze, the animal owner was not around to break the ice.

Lesson Learned: This is a statement about community responsibility to report abuse and neglect.

Wallman currently faces charges of animal cruelty and neglect involving a separate set of seventeen horses. He goes for trial on 22 June at the local circuit court in Torrington. I hope some WYCAP members will attend the trial, assuming the case is not set back again. Having witnesses in the courtroom makes a statement to the judge: these are not minor incidents, and the public is engaged.

Lesson Learned:  Animal hoarding is a psychological issue often linked to past trauma, and often leads to neglect, starvation and death. It requires specialized intervention.

An elderly local man recognized the situation and started hauling his own hay to the horses. In January 2026, due to a family situation, he reluctantly stopped feeding. Remarkably, another local man stepped up and fed his hay to keep the horses going.

Our initial approach was to contact the Goshen County sheriff, Kory Fleenor. We offered to work with local animal rescues to get the horses placed for the winter, so that they would be fed and sheltered. A caveat was that the sheriff’s office confiscates the horses until green-up in March-April. I copied my letter to the Goshen County prosecuting attorney, Eric R. Boyer. Neither acknowledged nor responded to the letter. I tried contacting the state veterinarian, Dr. Hallie Hasel. A Wyoming Livestock Board employee conveyed her message to me that the person I should talk to was Cody Myers, an investigator for the WLSB. Myers was both responsive and helpful. He explained that the board was already dealing with Wallman about the other group of seventeen horses, which were seized and sold at the Fort Collins, CO sale barn.

In the board’s view, the situation with the current group of fourteen was a civil and not criminal matter. He explained a quirk in the Wyoming statutes. If someone places animals on another person’s property and then fails to take care of them, the fix is for the property owner to seek a feed lien from the Secretary of State’s office. If granted, this gives the property owner limited ownership rights over the animals. If unpaid bills continue to stack up, and after following specific notification steps defined in statute, the landowner can sell the animals and recoup any financial losses. Any money left over from the sale goes to the animal owner.

A wrinkle in the Goshen 14 situation was that it was two concerned local men, not the landowner with the feed lien, who fed the horses. This complicated the lien process and any effort by the authorities to move the horses to a rescue or anywhere else. In Myer’s pithy phrase, “If [name of Good Samaritan] did less, we could do more.” I interpreted that to mean the board needed some horses to be in terminal condition or possibly dead before taking legal action. We are fortunate this is not the approach taken when parents neglect their children.

Lesson Learned: There is a need for a public registry of people in Wyoming who commit felony cruelty, including animal hoarding, to break the cycle, and so that landowners don’t rent property to these individuals.

As the costs of fed hay began to stack up, it seemed like an impasse. Then a local person from Goshen suggested a fix: try a GoFundMe (GFM) drive to raise money for hay to get the horses through the winter. I was initially skeptical. I had never done anything like this before but, with trepidation, I gave it a go. The story was picked up by Cowboy State Daily. After an online interview with CSD, the money flowed in. The goal was to raise $5,000, which in retrospect was a serious underestimation of the current price of hay. One hundred and twelve generous individuals donated $11,249 through GFM. Of this, $8,175 went for hay. The balance was donated to two animal rescues: to Home on the Range in Laramie with hay purchased at the Feed Store, Laramie, and to Waggin’ Tails, a dog and cat rescue just outside Torrington.

Lesson Learned: The cost of maintaining even one horse is far more than most people would expect.

The feed lien (in truth, a lien that allowed the horses to graze a 30-acre pasture down to dirt) became effective on 12 March 2026. The horses were sold at the Torrington sale barn on 28 March. At that time, all the horses were in good nutritional condition. All went to good owners. I do not know what they sold for. One concern was that some might be bought for horse meat. A well-informed person told me all purchasers were known locally and trustworthy.

Bottom line: none of the fourteen horses died over the winter. Their condition improved with regular feeding, and they were presentable enough to be bought at a sale barn. I would have preferred them to go to local animal rescues in Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho so that prospective owners could be screened. But the lien eclipsed everything else. The only way to get a legal confiscation was to allow the horse’s condition to deteriorate, which was unacceptable.

I had not heard of horse hoarding before. I assumed it had to be rare, since feeding horses through the winter is expensive, especially after a dry summer. Two local men stepped up to feed the horses out of their own pocket. Their hay costs were covered retrospectively with the GFM proceeds, although nobody paid for their labor or time. The GFM approach worked astonishingly well, with money left over to assist animal rescues in two Wyoming counties.

I am grateful to both Goshen men who did the hard bit: feeding, checking on animals, and ensuring water was constantly available. My thanks, too, to a local person who gave advice, suggestions, and information, and shall remain anonymous, to GoFundMe and 112 kind souls, to two Cowboy State Daily journalists who helped get the word out on this situation, and to members of the WYCAP board for encouragement and direction.

Thank you all.

The Animal Legal & Historical Center at Michigan State University (MSU) College of Law is a premier, globally recognized, non-profit digital library and center of excellence for animal law. It hosts over 1,200 full-text cases and 1,400 statutes, providing expert analysis on animal welfare.