The Mustangs: America's Wild Horses

In THE MUSTANGS: AMERICA'S WILD HORSES, David Philipps (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Wild Horse Country) and other experts guide audiences through the story of wild horses in the United States. There are more than 80,000 wild horses on federal land and more than 50,000 in Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holding facilities. With no natural predators, wild horses can quickly exhaust their resources. The BLM tries to control the horse population size by rounding animals up and selling them at auction. While wild horses were incredibly useful before the onset of automobiles, their perceived usefulness faded in the 1950s -- they became seen more as pests, grazing on land that could be better used for cattle. At that point, horses were canned as meat for dog food. Velma Johnson, known as "wild horse Annie," witnessed horses being hauled off to slaughter and made it her mission to stop the roundups and save the mustang. Her activism captured the interest of young people across the United States, who inundated legislators with pleas to stop the roundups. Now there are multiple views on how to manage the wild horse population. Some people are highly invested in "mustang makeovers," where the horses are plucked from BLM holding facilities, trained, and sold at auction. Others use wild horses to help rehabilitate veterans. And others seek to preserve the family structures and natural habitat of wild horses through fertility treatment by darting the mares with birth control.