Draft Horses & Mules Fit in Like Lifers at Louisiana State Pen
by Miles R. McCarry
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Autumn 1999

It happened in 1997. The Mississippi River, which three-sides the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP) at Angola, Louisiana, was at record levels and rising. If the levee gave way, the state’s largest maximum security prison would become an 18,000 acre lake in six hours or less.

Men and machines, horses and mules, were working around the clock to keep that from happening. And though the issue was much in doubt, a convict on the sandbag crew said he wasn’t worried. “Warden Cain ain’t moved the horses out yet. And he ain’t about to let anything happen to them!”

Gallows humor? Could be. More that 85 percent of LSP’s 5,100-plus inmates are in for life. But on the other end of the stick, Warden Burl Cain, once a breeder of registered Percherons, knows and appreciates good horseflesh. And you could say the 300 horses and mules involved in the state pen operation aren’t far from the top of his list.

Most of the 300 are saddlers. We’ll get back to them. But first, let’s note that 50 draft horses and 17 mules are included in the count. And if they aren’t part of a successful power mix on some of the best farmland outdoors, they come as close as the width of a hame strap.

“Power mix,” if you’re wondering, is a term my late great friend Howard Johnstone, who bred Belgians in Kansas, enjoyed using. Tractors for the heavy stuff–teams around necessary edges. You wouldn’t use a four-plow tractor to haul water out to a crew in a sun-drenched field, would you?

Warden Cain, who harnesses eight or ten teams every day, has a lot of crews to water. Well over 1,600 inmates work eight hours a day, five days a week, in corn, cotton and vegetable fields. And Louisiana can get hot and humid enough to make Florida steaming jealous.

Keep in mind, too, that hand labor is regarded as desirable, not as something to mechanize away, on this farm. Lt. Colonel Donald Ray Davis, LSP’s hands-on draft horseman, puts it this way: “Inmates seem happier, and there’s less trouble when they’re constructively active.”

Don, to diverge, owned registered Percheron mares back when warden-to-be Cain had the only registered stallion of the breed in the state. And before “joining up” and rising through LSP’s 1,500 officer security force, Don managed and showed LaMar DePhillips’ then nationally-prominent Clydesdales for several successful years.

LaMar, still at Husser, Louisiana, breeds Angus these days. But the fact that there are horses in harness at LSP makes him a frequent visitor to what he describes as “a big, beautiful farm that just happens to be one of the biggest maximum security penitentiaries in the country.”

He’s not alone in thinking that way. An award-nominated movie about LSP was titled “The Farm” and Don Davis says that’s what inmates call the place. They just might be influenced by doing the “grunt” work on 800 acres of no less than 42 different vegetable crops.

Then there are 2,500 acres of soybeans, some of them double cropped with wheat, 870 acres of wheat, 600 of corn and 200 of cotton. Coastal Bermuda and ryegrass are hayed to the tune of 4,000 - 4,500 round bales for cattle and 10,000 - 15,000 square bales for horses.

A goodly hunk of the vegetables are consumed by the inmates. Some of the rest goes to the other state institutions. Surplus, like corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat and cattle, is sold to help with LSP’s $75 million annual budget. A freezing plant, now under construction, is expected to cut down vegetable spoilage and improve cash flow.

The 1,200 big-framed, roomy beef cows at LSP are end results of years and years of crossbreeding. Like most southern beef cattle, most of them are three-eighths to one-quarter Brahman. They weaned a 92 percent calf crop in 1999.

Heifers not needed as replacements, like all steers, are sold. “We don’t eat our own beef,” says Warden Cain, “because steak and white meat chicken aren’t on the menu.” And if you milk cows, you won’t be startled to learn that he got rid of his Holsteins because he could buy milk for less than it was costing him to produce it.

Getting back to the draft horses and mules, the warden regards working them, in teams of two, on his water wagons and for cultivating and harvesting, as “maximum utilization of resources.” And get that “teams of two.” Bigger hitches don’t fit in, not with tractors, as noted, doing the heavy work. And LSP has a lot of tractors.

“We’re harvesting over four million pounds of vegetables by hand,” says Cain. “We pull (husk) all our corn and pick all our cotton the same way. We tried using tractors on the wagons. All the stops and goes left most of them needing new clutches by the time we got through.

“Horses and mules are a lot cheaper than clutches, I can tell you. We raise our own replacements and most of what we feed them. And even inmates who don’t know horses can identify with animals that live in stalls about the size of cells and have to work every day.”

The warden regards horsemanship and horse shoeing as “marketable skills” for the lucky, and relatively few, who aren’t at Angola for life. And it could be argued that growing up around draft stock can be character building. Few inmates bring horse or mule experience to LSP with them.

Lt. Colonel Davis, good with people as well as horses and mules, hasn’t let this become a roadblock. He’s trained several good teamsters from scratch. He modestly insists, though, that some of his best inmate horsemen “prepped” by learning the rudiments around race tracks before running afoul of the law.

“If the team runs away and you jump, you’re in trouble” is a training rule. And since it seemingly doesn’t discourage wanna-be teamsters, Burl Cain might have something when he figures that inmates identify and like to work with horses.

He thinks that goes for mules, too. But that’s not the big reason he’s shooting for 12 teams of them. The big “why,” as you’d guessed, is “our hot weather is hard on horses.” What you might not guess is that Don Davis sees little difference between black and grey Percherons when it comes to ability to work under the blazing summer sun.

Meanwhile, Buddy Truax, who trains horses at LSP, is finding mules quicker and easier to break. And both he and Don Davis have the hybrids figured as considerably more amateur proof than horses. I think they mean smarter.

Be that as it may, there’s now a good-looking Mammoth Jack at LSP. Louisiana State University animal scientists built an A.I. program around him. Fifteen of 17 mares bred are safe in mule foal. And everybody from Warden Cain down confidently expects the mules to look even better than that 88 percent conception rate.

“That’s a real good jack,” Don Davis begins, “and our horses are way better than most mares that get bred to jacks. Warden Cain will see that those colts get grown out right, too. I think we’ll wind up with the best bunch of mules you’ll ever see.”

Warden Cain is even more enthusiastic. But he’s quick to note that his program for breeding “warm bloods”–as in diluted with Percheron-hot blood guard and police horses, is farther along and showing results. It dates back to using a stallion from Indiana Percheron man, Ralph Coddington, on prison-owned saddle mares.

The idea is to get a bigger, stronger mount with a draft disposition. “A warm blood,” says the warden, “can stand all day with a rifle-toting man on his back, without a lot of pawing, prancing and messing around.”

“You need a tall, lean, show quality Percheron stallion to start with,” says Cain. And after years of experience, he figures that a warm blood should stand at least 16 hands, two inches tall. That gives the security officer in the saddle a clear view of inmates in high cotton.

But get that “to start with.” Burl Cain still regards Percheron and saddler, half and half, as the best recipe for warm blood. But he’s come to believe that he gets closest to what he’s breeding for by using crossbred stallions on crossbred mares. Foals are still 50-50, Percheron and “hot blood.”

At maturity, they’re tall as advertised and in the 1,200-1,400 weight bracket. Ride one between two battling inmates and the fight’s over. “We price them to police departments at $3,500 to $5,000 apiece,” says the warden, “and we can’t keep up with demand.”

“We’ve sold them to Shreveport, Houston and New Orleans. We’ve had inquiries from Los Angeles, Tulsa, Louisville and Oklahoma City. First off, we had a few gripes because they weren’t all bays and blacks. But now that they’ve tried them, it’s forget the color, get the horse!”

And since stories about penitentiaries just don’t lend themselves to happy endings, “get the horse!” is about as close as we’ll get. But it could also be a line for other penal institutions to think along. Certainly, draft horses and mules are fitting in, and doing a job, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

No two ways about it, they’ve helped change the place once known as “the bloodiest jail in North America” into one of the best managed and most progressive institutions of its kind anywhere. And in the process, they’re saving Louisiana taxpayers wagonloads of money.

That’s the thought I came away with after a two-day tour great-guy-guided by the previously mentioned Lt. Colonel Donald Ray Davis. I’m sure I wouldn’t want to be a permanent resident. But I also can tell you that Don knows what he’s talking about–especially when he tells you good horses are where you find them