After two decades at the Albuquerque Police Department, Roch Hart said he needed a change of pace.
Hart "loved every minute" of his time on the police force, but eventually, the job began to get in the way of important life events with family, he said. So, he retired in 2001 before founding an off-roading company with a fleet of Jeeps. He then eventually began working full-time as the manager of a ranch.
Life on a ranch may be less intense than life in a radio car, but it doesn't come without challenges — particularly when it comes to tracking and controlling animal populations on rough terrain. That challenge spurred the creation of Hart's new company, called Wildlife Protection Management, which aims to identify, vaccinate and help track animals.
The company's platform uses low-velocity darts to deliver vaccines and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that can provide alerts for booster vaccines and health monitoring. Alongside RFID chips, the company is also developing facial recognition technology to monitor the animals.
Darts can be used to deliver vaccines to horses, but doing so can be difficult — and costly. For the 2021 fiscal year, the Bureau of Land Management, which is under the U.S. Department of the Interior, appropriated $115 million to manage wild horses and burros. During the previous fiscal year, the holding of animals off-range accounted for the majority of the money spent for managing the animals, according to a July 2021 report from the Congressional Research Service.
"We had a population of wild and feral horse and I was wondering if there was a way I could humanely deal with population growth," Hart said.
So he turned to New Mexico State University, where he participated in the AgSprint business accelerator and then onto the Arrowhead Technology Incubator.
Wildlife Protection Management also received a $256,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a system for animal recognition with New Mexico State University, according to the college.
As part of the project, the company will work with professor Laura Boucheron, Ph.D., an associate professor at New Mexico State University's College of Engineering. She will spend a year analyzing data from the company to create the animal recognition system with videos and images.
“While they have RFID chips, the horses might have recognizable patterns on their faces or flanks or even scars that we can use to build an algorithm that detects individual animals,” Boucheron said in a statement.
Wildlife Protection Management's potential customers lie throughout the Southwest, including tribal and federal entities as well as private ranchers. The company is operating lean with five employees and about $145,000 in investment, according to Hart.
“I didn’t realize when I started this where it would start taking us," he said. "This is fun. It's really exciting."
