HerStory: Meet Tolani Francisco
This story is part of a series highlighting the contributions women have made to the Forest Service. If you’d like to nominate someone to be featured in a HerStory piece, please contact Patricia Burel.
NEW MEXICO—Meet Dr. Tolani Francisco, Southwestern Region wild horse and burro coordinator.
The only girl growing up in her family, Francisco recalls, “I knew that I had to be tough. I had to have some tenacity.” A citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna, Francisco finds powerful inspiration in her family and background.
“I was blessed with a very rich heritage in my family,” she says. “And I think that helps me, having that groundedness.” When she first graduated from college, she was a woman in a male-dominated field, and one of the first female indigenous veterinarians.
She brings that tenacity to her work as the regional Wild Horse and Burro Coordinator for the Southwest Region. Francisco turns her efforts toward harmonizing national, regional and forest approaches to managing wild horses and burros and says she is “just trying to do right by all creatures, even the microbes in the soil that we can’t see.”
The work is sometimes controversial and involves efforts to reconcile ranchers’ needs, environmental groups’ concerns and forest management principles. But Francisco is equal to it. “I carry an awful lot of passion. I love horses,” she says. She uses holistic management to provide not just for the wild horses, but also for the land and other animals.
A graduate of Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, Francisco has worked for the government as a veterinarian since 1993, when she took a job in Helena, Montana, with USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Over the past 30 years, she has worked for APHIS, the U.S. Air Force and, since 2017, the Forest Service.
Francisco was of the first veterinarians to work on the controversial Yellowstone National Park bison Brucella abortus virus issue. She has also worked with wild horses in Nevada, and tested U.S.-bound Mexican cattle for disease. She has served as an APHIS foot and mouth disease coordinator in Bolivia, worked in public health for the U.S. Air Force, and generally, as she puts it, “spent a lot of time on the south end of a northbound Holstein.”
The Forest Service manages the nation’s wild horses and burros on National Forest System lands, work usually accomplished by individual forests in collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management.