Common Sense Media Review
By Jordan Elizabeth
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Docu on exploitation of and attempt to save wild horses.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 10+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Watch
Videos and Photos
The Mustangs: America's Wild Horses
Parent and Kid Reviews
What's the Story?
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.
Is It Any Good?
The Mustangs: America's Wild Horses is an informative, inspiring, yet incomplete history of wild horses in the United States. The documentary begins its story with White Western settlers using horses for transportation before the onset of automobiles. While there are mild references to Indigenous peoples through quotes such as "[horses] were going to go the way of the open range" and "disappear as a relic of the frontier," there's no explicit mention of the parallel experiences of wild horses and Indigenous communities: both slaughtered, both forced into subservience and pushed into inferior, often uninhabitable lands. And while the movie offers diversity of thought regarding methods for horse population management, there's little ethnic diversity in telling its story.
The film's production quality is rich with dazzling visuals of desert landscapes and mustangs galloping across the plains, making The Mustangs: America's Wild Horses a delight to watch. And the story of Velma Johnson, aka "wild horse Annie," is a powerful one: a woman, in 1950s United States, using her voice and finding a platform to stop the roundups and slaughtering of mustangs. The significance of youth activism in her story is inspiring too, with thousands of young people and school groups speaking to legislators and creating positive social change.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about how The Mustangs: America's Wild Horses handles the topic of wildlife conservation. Have you seen other movies on the topic?
What are your thoughts on the different tactics for mustang population control? Holding corrals and auctions? Fertility treatment to keep horses in the wild?
What role have young people played in stopping the slaughter of wild horses? Do you believe that young people have the power to make positive social change? Why, or why not?
Movie Details
- In theaters : October 15, 2021
- On DVD or streaming : November 23, 2021
- Directors : Steven Latham , Conrad Stanley
- Studio : Virgil Films and Entertainment
- Genre : Documentary
- Topics : Activism , Animals ( Wild Animals )
- Character Strengths : Compassion , Empathy
- Run time : 90 minutes
- MPAA rating :
- Last updated : September 29, 2025
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