It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, March 24th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by the Cowboy State Daily Morning Show! From 6 to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, we bring you news, weather, sports AND in-depth interviews with news-makers from across Wyoming - and this week we’ve got a fantastic guest host, Charene Herrera, who will keep the conversation lively! Just click on the Cowboy State Daily homepage to join in.
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An escalating nationwide trend of vandalizing Tesla electric vehicle products has reached Wyoming, with a row of Rock Springs Tesla Superchargers spraypainted with swastikas either late Friday night or early Saturday morning.
Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland spoke with a representative of the Rock Springs Police Department, who said it seemed to be a political statement.
“I was talking to the spokeswoman for the police department, Elizabeth Coons, and I said, Why do you believe it's political? And she said, Well, there's these Tesla brand chargers here, and right across the street there's non Tesla specific electric vehicle chargers, and those were untouched, so they specifically targeted the ones under Elon Musk's company… it's the first I've heard of in Wyoming. And she said, No, the vehicles, we haven't seen the vehicles attacked or anything like that yet.”
Colorado prosecutors charged a woman last month in connection with attacks on Tesla dealerships, including the throwing of Molotov cocktails at vehicles and spray-painting the words “Nazi cars” on a building.
Read the full story HERE.
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Since Colorado began reintroducing wolves in late 2023, many people thought it would be a matter of when, not if, some of those wolves strayed into Wyoming, where they would likely be killed.
The “when” turned out to be March 15, when USDA Wildlife Services killed a wolf in north-central Wyoming that had traveled from Colorado and attacked sheep on private property.
Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that if the loss of that wolf in Wyoming turns into a trend, it could hurt Colorado’s wolf recovery program.
“I talked to people from a few different points of view, environmentalist, wildlife conservationist, you know, a hunter and someone from the ag community. No one's really surprised that this happened, that that a wolf from Colorado came into Wyoming. I mean, they don't recognize state lines or other jurisdictions. They just go where they go… if this happens too too much, if too many of the Colorado wolves cross over and get shot in Wyoming, it could endanger their wolf reintroduction program. Otherwise, the folks in Wyoming are like, you know, nothing unusual. We're not particularly alarmed about this. It's not going to change Wyoming's wolf policy.”
In Wyoming, wolves are fully protected within the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. In some areas adjacent to the park, they may be hunted only with licenses and during set hunting seasons. Across the rest of the state — including along the entire state line with Colorado —wolves may be shot on sight at any time, with no license required.
Read the full story HERE.
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For much of their lives, Malachy Springer and Kayla Riley have been on and off the streets. They survive however they can, homeless, expecting a child and living in an abandoned car in a vacant lot in Casper.
Springer and Riley are among the growing number of people experiencing homelessness in Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Zak Sonntag spent some time with Malachy and Kayla, learning about their lives on the streets.
“On the surface, you wouldn't see these people and be like they're homeless, they're living on the street. That's not the impression they give. You know, Malachi especially, he's got kind of a cool style. He takes pride in what he wears. He's funny, he's clever… But then you start to see how he lives… just sleeping in his car, you know, and we're talking about through a Wyoming winter. He's been there for months, he's been sleeping in negative degrees in a car, and that'll wear on anybody… Kayla Riley, she's also interesting… she's cautious, she's soft spoken, and, you know, I would later learn that, I think that a big Part of that is because of the trauma that she's dealt with… but it's so encouraging to see that she's fighting through it, and she's keeping awareness about her situation and getting over drug addiction. And so it's a pretty it's a really inspiring tale, and they're still just out there battling right now. You know, living in the elements.”
Springer and Riley are among the growing number of people experiencing homelessness in Wyoming, which in the Casper area is estimated to have risen by 15% in the last year. Their experience calls attention to the hardship of unsheltered life and offers a glimpse at what more Wyomingites are likely to face if the trend continues.
Read the full story HERE.
Taking a razor-sharp skate to the neck is the nightmare fear of every hockey player and their families. But one Wyoming youth hockey family is praising a new rule that saved the life of an 11-year-old Casper player when his hockey nightmare happened.
Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck spoke to the parents of Carter Lein, whose neck was cut by a fellow skater last weekend - but a simple piece of protective equipment prevented what could have been a devastating tragedy.
“This year, US hockey mandated that all of the kids that play hockey have to wear a neck guard, and so that neck guard is what saved this 11 year old's life. He was scrambling to keep a puck out of the net. He's a defenseman. He got in a in a tussle with some other hockey players. They all tripped and escaped. Sliced him up neck. He grabbed his neck throughout the gloves, went to the bench, and his mom told me that, you know her, his dad, who was an assistant coach, put up his hand and said, you know, is there any medic in the house? And after that, it was just, you know, a sense of this could be really a serious event. But what saved him was that neck guard, even though his neck was sliced in two different places.”
Carter received eight stitches to close the wound left by the skate. A CT scan showed the cut was an inch away from his artery.
Read the full story HERE.
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And now let’s take a look at today’s weather, with Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day.
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You can get Don’s full forecast on the Cowboy State Daily website. I’ll be back in just 15 seconds with more news.
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In the world of waste disposal, mattresses are like retirement deniers, notoriously reluctant to accept their own end.
Bulky, light and clingy, they’re known to “float” to the top of waste piles like bobber lures, and mattress turnover is a daily headache for Wyoming’s landfill operators. Cowboy State Daily’s Zak Sonntag spoke to landfill operators that described mattresses as having a personified and zombie-esque will to live.
“The mattress is the bane for any disposal operator. It's just so notorious in this world for being the thing that refuses to die… the only way you make revenue is you have to pack the waste in as tightly as you can get it. Just gotta shove it in there, pack it in there, get it as condensed as possible. That's how you turn a profit in this world. But the mattress is almost like it's a saboteur. It systematically makes it so hard to pack, not only because it's kind of light and bulky, but when it clings on to the compactors and kind of grips and gets tangled and yanks itself up, it loosens everything, and it just drives these operators crazy. They just get up to their what's end with these mattresses, some of them now won't even take the mattresses.”
However, for some business owners, mattresses dispose of themselves. One furniture store in Casper doesn’t mind the trespassing and theft that occur when it comes to the piles of used mattresses that get left behind their store - they’re glad that someone gets a good night’s sleep, and they don’t have to haul the mattresses to the dump.
Read the full story HERE.
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More large breed dogs are winding up in urban animal shelters with high kill rates, which is why more rural shelters are rescuing them for better lives sometimes thousands of miles away.
Norris Ark in southwest Montana is part of a recue network that transports shelter animals away from facilities with high kill rates, and sometimes that means booking flights for big dogs in need.
Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that Norris Ark has rescued its biggest project yet — literally — in a huge 120-pound Saint Bernard named Carson.
“People working in animal rescue in Wyoming may already know a lot about this, but it was news to me that there is a network of volunteers rescuing dogs from high kill shelters in big urban areas, including Los Angeles. Now, if you're interested in adopting a large dog that is in a shelter in a place like L.A., now's the time to do it, because there is a surplus of them. I spoke to a animal rescue operation in Norris, Montana. It's just a little town between Ennis and Bozeman, and they are part of this network, and they are so remote that they had to rely on three private pilots to bring Carson to them.”
The national nonprofit group Shelter Animals Count reported in 2024 that overall intakes at shelters are on the decline. But animals in shelters are staying longer.
Read the full story HERE.
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One of Wyoming’s most incredible wildlife experiences is watching bighorn sheep violently bashing their heads together.
When rams can’t reconcile their differences or are competing for the attention of ewes during the rut, they charge at each other at up to 30 mph and slam their heads together with a crash that can be heard up to a mile away.
It’s an incredible display that can make people wonder why their heads don’t explode on impact. So Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi set out to find the answer to that question.
“When they head butt, they're, I mean, that's 2000 pounds of pressure coming at 30 miles per hour directly into their head, which is not an ideal place, considering you've got brain bits and other important parts up there. So how they're able to withstand such forces is they've got a really unique skull. Their skull is thicker at the top, and then they have a layer of honeycomb between the top of their skull and the skull cap, which protects their brain… And then they've got bone structure they can fill with fluid to create, like this spongy, soft layer to absorb more of that impact. So they're the ultimate head butters, in that respect. They've got a skull that's not perfectly designed, but it is evolved and designed to withstand those incredible pressures repeatedly.”
In late winter and spring, bighorn sheep are placidly grazing and moving through their native ranges throughout Wyoming. Rams will only go head-to-head to compete for females and dominance during their rutting season, usually between the end of October and mid-December.
Read the full story HERE.
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It takes love and a lot of patience to rehabilitate a beagle that was born and bred to be a lab animal. That’s what many rescuers have discovered, who have adopted dogs from the Kindness Ranch in Hartville - an organization that rescued more than 150 lab beagles last year alone.
Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher spoke to one couple who adopted one such beagle from Kindness Ranch. They thought, because they already had one beagle, bringing another one home would be easy. But laboratory animals have a lot of trauma to overcome.
“These dogs are in a lab for anywhere from six months to two years. So when you think about in their lab, there's no stimuli. You know, they're in their experiment, or whatever their test is, and they have minimal contact with humans, and the contact they have is not positive. So when they come out of there, you know, some are more traumatized than the next, and one couple from Billings adopted one that was incredibly traumatized… they'd already had a beagle badger, and so they thought, okay, badger will be able to train Gabe, the Beagle they adopted, and it didn't Gabe did not know how to lift his leg, for example, to urinate like, you know, you think that dogs come out of the womb. Knowing how to do that like it's got to be instinct, but it's not… and rolling in the grass, foreign. And you would think any dog can do that easily, no. And Gabe, still to this day is uncomfortable on grass, and that's just kind of the tactile stuff. And then you have the overhead sounds like, you know, anything that they've never heard before, like cars beeping sirens overhead helicopters, all of that just shuts them down.”
As they learned, everything is on the animal’s time, which is just part of helping the dog adjust to its new environment. Often it requires a lot of patience, even for the beagle to warm up to its new owner. But for the couple who adopted Gabe, the love far outweighs any of the work, and they’ve since adopted a second Kindness Ranch rescue.
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for tuning in - I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.
