Recommended reading & films to help you understand why the public lands and wild horse & burro issues are so complicated:

Films:

Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West
An immersive journey into the world of wild horses that illuminates the profound beauty and desperate plight they face in the Western United States. Filmmaker Ashley Avis and crew try to uncover the truth before wild horses disappear forever. Click here for options to order the movie. 

WINNER:
Boston Film Festival 2022:  “Best Documentary”
St. Louis International Film festival 2022:  “Best Documentary”
Sunscreen Film Festival 2023:  “Best Documentary”
DOC LA 2022:  “Best Director”
DOC LA 2022:  “Best Cinematography”
Red Rock Film Festival 2023:  “Best Cinematography” 

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Books:

A stirring invitation to awe--and to what it means to be wild.
Through the lens of the wild mustang, social scientist and poet Chad Hanson gives us new ways to see and meaningfully engage our world as we enter new considerations about how we understand animals and our landscapes, our history, and ourselves. What is a wild animal? How do feelings of reverence reconnect us with nature? What can we learn from our wisdom traditions? And in the end, what would it look like if we managed public land with the common good in mind? With wisdom gathered from the histories of the American West, geography, philosophy, theology, and sociology, we meet awe anew.
​In the tradition of the great literary and nature writers, In a Land of Awe serves as a plea for what we stand to lose if we don't find the courage to protect the planet's most beautiful, and vulnerable, others.

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A hard-hitting look at the battle now raging over the fate of the public lands in the American West--and a plea for the protection of these last wild places

The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations.

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The true story of the intrepid woman whose life-long determination to protect America’s mustangs captured the heart of the country.

In 1950, Velma Johnston was a thirty-eight-year-old secretary enroute to work near Reno, Nevada, when she came upon a truck of battered wild horses that had been rounded up and were to be slaughtered for pet food. Shocked and angered by this gruesome discovery, she vowed to find a way to stop the cruel round-ups, a resolution that led to a life-long battle that would pit her against ranchers and powerful politicians—but eventually win her support and admiration around the world. This is the first biography to tell her courageous true story.

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Wild Horse Country by David Philipps: The wild horse, popularly known as the mustang, is so ingrained in the American imagination that even those who have never seen one know what it stands for: freedom, independence, the bedrock ideals of the nation. But in modern times it has become entangled in controversy and bureaucratic mismanagement, and now its future is imperiled. In Wild Horse Country, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter David Philipps traces the rich history of wild horses in America and investigates the shocking dilemma they pose in our own time.

In 1950 Velma Johnston, a shy Nevada ranch wife, came upon a horse trailer leaking blood. When she discovered the destination of the trailer and its occupants—a trio of terrified and badly injured wild horses—she launched a crusade that eventually reached the halls of Congress and changed the way westerners regard and treat the bands of mustangs and burros that roam their region.

Velma Johnston, who became known as “Wild Horse Annie,” undertook to stop the removal of wild horses and burros from US public lands and protect them from the worst aspects of mustanging. Her campaign attracted nationwide attention, as it led her from her rural Nevada County to state offices and finally to Washington, DC. 

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The Wild Horse Conspiracy by Craig C. Downer
This stirring book fully justifies America's magnificent wild horses and burros while countering the biased machinations against them. Written by an ecologist who grew up observing these animals in the West, it presents new evidence concerning their history and evolution in North America then describes their many positive contributions to soils, plants, animals and people. 

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Music:

The Bushpilots
The band has called their new album 'Kings of Mustang', complete with album design cover featuring a lone wild mustang on a desert highway- a haunting image depicting the disappearance of wild horses throughout the American west.
The album can be ordered here:  thebushpilots.bandcamp.com/album/kings-of-mustang

thebushpilots.ca