The Mustangs: America's Wild Horses

(stirring music) - [Robert] This is Robert Redford.

Wild horses are still out there among the sagebrush, dust and rock.

(horses whinny) In some of the most remote and rugged places in the American West.

They remain an iconic symbol of freedom and strength.

The journey of the American mustang is a story of resilience, an epic battle for survival in a changing world.

They are part of our history, but their future is far from certain.

This is the story of America's wild horses.

(stirring music continues) (gentle music) - When people ask me what my book is about, I say wild horses.

And 90% of people will say, "I didn't know there were wild horses."

And then I say, "Not only are there wild horses, but we have about 80,000 wild horses roaming the West, and we've got 50,000 and growing in government feedlots and in pastures."

There's far more wild horses than both the government and many people who live in Western states would like to see.

I think we're in a crisis today.

We haven't found a real, sustainable way to limit populations.

Right now, the estimate to capture, process and store a horse is about $50,000.

If you put that all together with the number of horses that are in captivity now, the cost is right around a billion dollars.

It's serious.

If we don't do something, the number of herds is going to grow on the range and eventually, I have no idea if that's at 100,000 or 200,000 or 300,000, but eventually they're going to exhaust their resources and they're going to die off.

Nobody wants that and nobody can figure a way out.

We should have it within our national ability to preserve our icons.

Not everything worth saving can be put in a museum.

- Come on.

(fence bangs) - We've created a management program that nobody of any political stripe likes and we don't have a way out.

And I thought, well, I really want to understand how we got here and try and look for alternatives.

(gentle acoustic music) I ride an old paint I lead an old Dan I'm going to Montana To throw the houlihan - The first Americans going into the prairies in the early 1800s encountered herds of horses that they described like waves in the ocean, herds that would take hours to pass by.

Historically, the mustangs roamed in vast numbers when they got loose from the first Spanish settlers.

You can think of the New Mexico Spanish land holdings as this fountain of wild horses.

Tribes that first got the horses had something that everybody wanted, and so they would trade to the tribes of the plains.

You might lose half of them in the process.

And those horses spread throughout the West.

The mustang really became an embodiment for some of the values that we admired.

He was strong, fast.

He was the king of the plains.

Tie my bones to the saddle Face my pony to the West And we'll both ride the country That we love the best - When the legend of the wild horse grew in the telling through dime novels and radio operas and all of that.

(upbeat brass music) The bad guy never rides a wild horse.

It's only the good guy who rides a wild horse.

The Lone Ranger rides a wild horse, but it's not 'cause he roped him, it's 'cause he rescued him.

The wild horse still couldn't be conquered, but it would submit to a person who is true of heart.

- Hi ho Silver.

- It became this icon that really sort of jumped the fence even after the era of the horse was gone.

- [Narrator] Mustang, everything that its name implies, bold, strong.

- [David] This little car that didn't cost very much but was fast and powerful and fun.

They called it the Mustang.

(car engine roars) - [Narrator] Built for freedom.

(car engine continues to roar) Power and rebellion.

- [David] And there was just this broad cultural language of understanding that the Mustang was a stand-in for this reliable companion.

- [Narrator] An SUV with the heart of a Mustang.

(blues guitar music) - My name is Stormy Mullins, Event Director for the Mustang Heritage Foundation.

The purpose of the Mustang Heritage Foundation is to increase adoptions of wild horses through competitive events such as the Mustang Makeover.

(blues guitar music continues) - The Mustang Heritage Foundation works in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, where we take wild mustangs who have been out on rangelands that they gather and we give them a purpose, because a lot of them are in holding facilities where they're not being utilized.

- Hey, Jerry Jones, how are you?

- I'm doing good.

- Good to see you.

- We take selected trainers from around the country.

They get a wild mustang.

It's never been handled, and they have 100 days to train and prepare this horse to be in a competition where they showcase the trainability and versatility of an American mustang.

And at the end of this, there is a freestyle finals.

And then from there they auction off every single mustang at that competition.

- To come to Texas to show in a venue like the Will Rogers is amazing.

This horse was gathered last year in October.

He hasn't been out of the wild a full year.

- 100 days ago, these horses were nearly untouchable.

It can be a very dangerous situation, but there's something special about a mustang that once they trust you and you build that respect and relationship with them, there's nothing like it.

(emotive music) - There are very few animals where we've really been able to successfully have a companion relationship with them.

Myths lie in the mind, not in the land.

It's not that the wild horse asked for us to make it an icon, but the reality in the West was something really different.

There is no doubt that the mustang was a companion to the cowboy, but the wild horse in the West in the 1800s was really, if you boil it down, it was just free energy.

It was muscle that could be taken for almost nothing, for the cost of going out and catching it, and put to all sorts of uses.

They ended up pulling plows in the South, pulling trolleys in big, Eastern cities like New York.

We shipped them off to World War I where we sold them to the French and British who were desperate for more horses.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of horses were taken out of the West.

Even today, there are wild horses that are doing all kinds of things.

You know, they're police horses, they're border patrol horses.

Wild horses are unbelievably tough.

We have pushed them to the remnants of where they can survive and that has probably made them even tougher.

(gentle country music) - My name is Mary Kitzmiller and I'm a local horse trainer based in Kemp, Texas.

- Where are you and Remy off to this morning?

- I'm just gonna go to stretch his legs out over on the pasture.

(gentle country music continues) So this year the mustang I got for the Makeover is Remington.

He actually came with his name.

This is the first one that I didn't name myself.

Well, Remington came out of Salt Wells Creek, Wyoming, and they had already named him Remington.

I thought that would be a neat thing for him to keep that with him coming in from the wild.

There we go.

When I first picked him up, he was actually really defensive and kicking the heck out of everybody.

So my first impression of him was actually, oh my gosh, is this horse gonna be hard?

Is he gonna be a challenge?

He was being very aggressive.

He's a 1,000 pound animal.

If he doesn't wanna be touched or caught, it's not gonna happen.

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

But once we got him off by himself, and he wasn't with so many other strange horses, I could already see even before doing any training with him that he really was gonna be a quiet and good horse to work with.

Good job.

And I ran into Ann Souders, who works with Mustang Heritage Foundation, and she goes, "Oh my gosh, I know that horse."

And she pulls out her cell phone and she's got pictures of Remington.

- I've seen him in the wild, pictures of him for years.

She could see where he came from and he's touched her heart.

I mean, he's touched all of our hearts, her horse.

- He'd been pretty well documented by some photographers up there, namely Pat Doak.

- Pat Doak is a photographer in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Through her pictures, she has helped raise awareness of the Wyoming mustangs.

- I photographed Remington for I would say two and a half years in the wild, shortly before he was gathered.

And I told her, "You have to come up here.

You have to see where Remington came from."

- I've never seen BLM mustangs in their element.

So I think that's gonna be kind of a neat thing to add to my own mustang journey.

I've seen Wyoming before, but seeing it this way, there's been a time capsule.

You really get a sense of how much commotion and noise is in your life when you go out to a place like here, and it's sort of this really beautiful kind of desolate and then there's no noise.

(peaceful music) - Wild horses exist where we do not.

They are in the places we never go to.

Wild horses are managed by a small part of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that surprisingly a lot of people have never heard of.

After the Homestead Act, after mining, after cities were settled, what was the land that nobody wanted to own?

That's the land that the Bureau of Land Management manages now, 250 million acres of federal land, 12% of which are HMAs or herd management areas.

That's where the wild horses live.

Eastern California, the Great Basin, parts of Idaho, Nevada, Utah, the deserts of Arizona, the mesas of Colorado, high and cold sagebrush flats in Wyoming, places that really haven't changed much since the days of the frontier.

- [Mary] The first step we took in actually trying to find the horses was Pat's knowledge.

So she knew what roads to take us down.

- I know the area, I know where the water holes are, I know where the horses hang out, but still, sometimes it can be difficult.

Sometimes you find them right away, sometimes you don't.

All right, nothing here.

Let's go back to the truck and keep on looking.

It covered a lot of miles of checking out one spot and then driving back.

Well, maybe they're here, you know, let's drive back there.

(peaceful music continues) (Mary gasps) - Oh, they're beautiful.

Look at that.

So it's a bunch of different little family groups and they're okay hanging out with each other?

- [Pat] Yeah.

- [Mary] They're coming right at us, guys.

- [Pat] It started off as a hobby and then it kind of evolved with social media, contacting adopters and adopters contacting me, keeping track of the lineage of the horses and following their lineage and their history.

There's a lot of history here.

- Is this where Remington would've been?

- Yes, yes, Remington's been down here.

I've seen Remington down here.

- [Mary] Wow.

- [Pat] As a baby and as a teenager.

- I can't believe he walked this far.

- I know.

(group laughs) (peaceful music continues) - Oh my goodness.

Oh, he's having the time of his life.

- In the public lands, the BLM land that's across the nation, we have about 27 million acres.

There's over 81,000 mustangs on that acreage.

And you think, well, that's a lot of acres, but it's barren, a lot of desert, not a lot of vegetation or water and 81,000 is a lot of horses.

So we need to find more tools to help us with this issue.

Right now, we have a lot of opinions in the mustang world.

A lot of people want them all left free.

Many people want them all gathered.

Many people don't even know there's wild mustangs.

So it gets really tough because there's too many horses for one area, not enough food, not enough water, that's rough.

The last time there was a gather with these horses was last year they took 167 horses.

- You know when you know they're gonna get gathered and you know, how does it feel, the horses that you've sort of followed and they're here one day and then you come out and they're not here anymore?

- Well, it's hard.

You just get to a point where you'd say, now I'm gonna get my pictures together so people have an idea who was gathered.

So the adopters are able to see photographs of the horses when they were in the wild, and that makes that horse all the more special.

- Wild mustangs are on government property in 10 Western United States.

They do not have natural predators.

If left to their own, they will double in population every four to five years.

So there is the situation, are there too many horses?

- The Bureau of Land Management's mission is that they have to manage the land for multiple uses and sustainable uses, and that means recreation and that means wildlife, and that means cattle grazing and that means horses.

The Bureau of Land Management is an alphabet soup of different acronyms.

And one of them that they're constantly talking about is AML, which is appropriate management level, sort of a magic number that they set in the '70s saying here is the target population of horses we want and if it gets over, we're gonna remove down to AML.

Of course, when you are the arbiter of this really broad array of compromises, you can guarantee that you're not gonna make anyone happy.

And so people who advocate for wild horses don't like how the BLM handles it and people who are cattle ranchers don't like how the BLM manages it.

Right now, there's at least 80,000 wild horses living on federal land.

What the government wants is somewhere around 27,000 horses.

And so every year the BLM spends millions of dollars trying to get to AML.

And this approach, which they've been doing for 40 years, has never worked.

(calm country music) - So I adopted my mustang, Remington.

He came out of Wyoming, so he probably would've gone through one of these facilities.

- Oh, very similar facility.

He would've been unloaded off the truck, separated by sex and age, put into large pens and the mares and foals are paired back up again.

And then they'll also with a stallion, they'll have to geld them.

A few weeks later, we start to prepare them for adoption depending on the condition of the animals as they come off the range, get them ready by vaccinating, deworming, pooling blood work and applying a freeze brand.

- Once they cross out of the free roaming system and into the Bureau's holding system, there is nothing like the freeze brand.

It is absolutely iconic.

- After we've shaved the spots and put the alcohol on there, the brand iron is actually in a container with the liquid nitrogen in it.

We can then take the, right out of the cooler, right up on the horse's neck.

It doesn't burn, it doesn't hurt 'em, it just changes the color of the hair after it grows back.

That freeze brand has the age, facility that it came from and then the individual number for the horse so that they are kind of have their own individual number for the rest of their life.

- It marks these horses as horses who were captured from the wild.

Certainly, it's the mark of the mustang.

(horses whinny) - I've been a mustang trainer for almost a decade now and you know, and I've trained horses for far longer than that.

So you think you kind of know a lot about horses and about the mustangs, but it's totally different to physically be able to see where this horse started and then where he went when he was gathered, just kind of adds more to his story.

(contemplative music) - At the turn of the 20th century, of course, we started moving away from horses and started moving into cars and that changed things for the mustang.

We were no longer needing them for work animals, but there still continued to be a value for them.

It's just that that changed.

Philip Chappel is a guy who started out buying horses that he could sell to buyers in Europe during World War I.

He was just a middleman.

But what he realized after World War I is the horse market in the United States collapsed and he saw an opportunity there.

Let's get horses, as many horses as we can get, and can 'em as meat.

Its main market was actually dog food.

If you look at old pictures of the factory that the smokestack that sits above it all has, it's spelled out on it, "Ken.

L. Ration".

Ken-L Ration was the food that was recommended by Rin Tin Tin on all his radio shows.

They made no secret that it was made of horse meat.

- [Narrator] Ken-L Ration is packed with lean red meat.

It contains the wholesome steaks, chops and roasts of US government inspected horse meat, plus every nutrient a dog is known to need.

(somber music) - The biggest supply of horses were mustangs in the West.

They could be had pretty much for free.

To put it in perspective, when he opened for business in the mid 1920s, there was an estimated 2 million horses out in the West.

And over the decades, from the 1920s to the 1940s, there was maybe 50,000 left.

That doesn't mean that this type of slaughter stopped.

By the '60s, once the horse meat industry collapsed, horses were just turned into fertilizer or chicken feed.

Essentially, their blood and their bones could be spread on the land and help to make things grow.

But that was enough to keep people going out to get them until they were almost gone.

These final roundups were covered even by big, daily newspapers and into the movies, but they covered it almost more like a spectacle.

Here's one of the last, great roundups of the West, that bygone era.

(horse whinnies) (indistinct shouting) The lowest point in the late '60s, there was maybe as few as 10,000 wild horses left.

It was at the brink of annihilation.

And it wasn't until we had lost what we had that we stopped for the first time maybe in human history and said, we're going to save some of this stuff.

And the wild horse was one of those things that we decided was worth saving.

(cheerful country music) (water splashes) (cheerful country music continues) - [Pat] Never would I ever have thought that he would end up here.

- He's just been amazing.

- Yeah.

- You would never know that he was a wild mustang.

- [Announcer] Next up, hit number 63, Remington, and Mary Kitzmiller.

(audience applauds and cheers) (uplifting music) - Competition is actually really tough this year and I was hoping to see that.

Those who have been here before, they know what to bring to the table.

But there's obviously others that show up that have never been here before and it's kind of a lot to take in.

So you kind of gotta be on your toes and you gotta be ready to really show your horse.

(uplifting music continues) - My name's Brittani Johnson and this will be my rookie year in the Extreme Mustang Makeover.

My horse for this year's competition is Pearl Snap and he is a 5-year-old gelding from the Salt Wells Creek HMA in Wyoming.

I live in Vashti, Texas.

Yeah, so today is the 98th day that I've had Pearl Snap.

And I'll tell you what, 95 days ago, I would've never, ever imagined that we would be here.

Maybe on the first day, them just looking at you is a major success.

Whereas on day 98, I don't even see that anymore.

That's not even, today I'm worried about if he's going to properly do a flying lead change.

In the real world, that's a two-year training process.

This really highlights how handy they can be, how accepting they are of pressure.

And that's important for whenever the horse moves on, if he ends up being adopted.

- [Announcer] Thank you to hit number 59.

(audience applauds and cheers) Pearl Snap ridden by Brittani Johnson.

- So I messed up and whenever I was turning him, he was like kind of going wide.

So I reached down and I grabbed my rein, which you're not supposed to do in a shanked bridle, but whatever.

(Brittani laughs) - So this year we have 60 trainers that are competing to qualify to be in the top 10.

- [Announcer] Our last finalist, congratulate Mary Kitzmiller and Remington.

(audience applauds and cheers) - So the horses that do not qualify to be in the top 10 finals performance will be auctioned this Saturday afternoon.

- I think this whole process, the competition, the show, the adoption, and maybe even if we're lucky enough, being able to see what the horses do after the show, it's really been able to bring to light what these horses are capable of.

I call him Pearly.

- Pearly?

- Yeah.

- So my name's Patty and I run a veterans program called Operation Wild Horse and we use all mustangs in our program.

- [Brittani] Okay.

- So we came all the way down here from Illinois to look specifically at the mustangs in the Makeover to see if there's anyone that we thought would fit our program.

- He's thinking about it.

Operation Wild Horse is thinking about buying Pearl Snap.

They wanna match him up with a veteran and hopefully give somebody a new lease on life.

I wanted Pearl Snap so bad to go to somebody that would really care about him and do something with him.

And I don't think that there's people out there that would give him as much love and get so much joy from him as a group like that.

(acoustic country music) - [Announcer] All right, there we go.

- There's going to be a little bit of drama, tears, but then there's also excitement.

The horse is finding a new home.

There'll be a family that's getting that horse and they're gonna be happy.

It'll be a good situation for everybody.

(acoustic country music continues) (audience cheers and applauds) - [Announcer] I still think we need to give a round of applause to that man next to her.

How about this young man right here?

(audience continues to cheer and applaud) - He's gonna save some lives.

- I know he is.

- Thank you for helping us.

- You knew, you knew that.

- What do you think?

- Well, you got a forever home, my friend.

- By the 1950s, there was maybe 20,000 wild horses left.

To the ranch man living in the Intermountain West, the wild horse was a pest, competition for forage that could better go to cattle.

And I think that really there was a broad understanding that they were, they were gonna go the way of the open range, disappear as a relic of the frontier.

But that's sort of the turning point where everything changed.

Velma Johnston was a chain smoking secretary, but she's better known as Wild Horse Annie, the Gandhi of the mustang movement.

She lived in Nevada and had grown up around these wild horses, which she loved.

Not only were they being hauled off of public lands and sent to be turned into fertilizer, but it was being done in such a inhumane way.

She was on her way to work one morning as a secretary and she saw a group of mustangs in a trailer being hauled off to slaughter.

And she noticed that blood was dripping out of the back of the trailer and was concerned.

So she followed this trailer until it pulled over outside of Reno and she said, "Hey, hey, Mister.

You know, you ought to look in the back of the trailer.

Something's going on."

And he essentially replied, "Oh, it's just a bunch of mustangs and they're just going to the fertilizer plant anyway."

And she looked into the trailer and these animals were just decimated.

A few colts had been trampled on the floor of this overcrowded trailer and were just basically, you know, a pulp.

She was outraged.

And from that point on, she decided that she was gonna do something to stop this kind of treatment and to save the mustang.

- It had now touched my life.

I could not have lived with myself had I not tried to do something about it.

And it was destined to reach into the lives of many, many thousands of people as time went on.

- Very early on in her career as an activist, she went to a hearing and at the hearing was a BLM local office director.

And supposedly when she walked in, he said, "Oh, here she comes, Wild Horse Annie," meaning it as an insult.

But she really liked it and it became useful to her because she became kind of an icon herself.

You know, the feisty, little ranch woman who was gonna go up and save the wild horse.

It was a story that America, especially in the '50s, loved.

Wild Horse Annie's campaign to save the mustang was really very simple.

She wanted to stop the roundups.

At first, she tried to do that through a state law and she was able to do that by the end of the 1950s.

But then she realized that none of those laws would apply on federal land and Nevada is almost entirely federal land.

And so she had to expand to a national scale.

By 1970, there were between maybe 10,000 and 25,000 horses left.

She sounded the alarm to the American people saying, "Hey, this horse is disappearing.

It is part of your heritage.

It deserves to be saved.

Let's do this."

- The proposed legislation would give them status as a national heritage species and national aesthetic resource.

A unique category, but a very, very important one.

- I think the most important part is that it recognized that wild horses are an important part of our heritage.

You know, they deserve to exist.

Wild Horse Annie found a really motivated group of citizens in the children of the United States.

The Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, 4H, classrooms.

And so when she campaigned in Washington to get this law to stop the roundups on federal land, people in the press called it the Children's Crusade.

- I'm here as a representative of the schoolchildren of Oregon to testify for S1116, to preserve and protect wild horses and burros.

We have been working on this project since the 1st of January by writing letters to our state legislators and many other people who might help.

- [David] Hundreds of thousands of letters, literal mailbags of letters were pouring in to lawmakers from school groups all over the country saying, you know, please will you vote to save the mustang.

- One letter was from Natalie Wilkins of Jackson, Massachusetts and she wrote, "Every time the men come to kill the horses for pet food, I think you kill many children's hearts.

Until you do something about it, you'll keep many children very sad."

For Natalie and many others, I say please approve this bill as soon as possible.

(gentle piano music) - The fight has captured the interest of young people as no other issue ever has.

And as a result, they have become cognizant of their responsibilities, not only to the welfare of animals, but to becoming involved in the mechanics of the legislative process and awareness of their privileges as Americans and the potential for greatness and goodness.

- A number of legislatures at the time said you know, are we gonna cave in to these kids who just wanna save wild horses out on the range?

You bet we are.

And the law passed, I believe nearly unanimously.

- President Nixon today signed a bill to protect the 20,000 wild horse and burros that still roam free in the West.

The bill makes killing them a federal crime.

- Richard Nixon, who we don't necessarily think of as a liberal conservationist, he embraced the idea of protecting the wild horse and personally thanked Wild Horse Annie for doing what she had done.

The 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act is really the law that created wild horses in the modern era.

You were no longer allowed to capture, harass or kill wild horses or burros on federal land.

- [Velma] This whole saga began in 1950, took me from the courthouse of my county to the White House of my country.

I would've been shocked and disbelieving had I known that all of these incredible things would happen.

But you know, that's the great thing about living in America.

If you believe in something, you can really get in and fight for it.

- I present to you Mrs. Velma B. Johnston, commonly known as Wild Horse Annie.

(audience applauds) - The 1971 law was a turning point.

It stopped a century-long killing spree and it saved the wild horse from extinction.

(emotional music) I left my home Left my friends I didn't say goodbye I contract out to the BLM Up on the Montana line Chasing wild horses Chasing wild horses (horse whinnies) You lose track of time It's all just storms blowing through You come rolling 'cross my mind Your hair flashing in the blue Like wild horses Just like wild horses Just like wild horses (emotional music continues) - [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, are you excited to celebrate the spirit of the American mustang?

(audience applauds and cheers) - The American mustang are our horses.

They are symbols, that they are alive and well in the Western United States.

This competition is really the showcase of a lot of passion that people have for mustangs.

(audience applauds and cheers) - The thing that we're doing with these Mustang Makeovers is not only to physically get and train horses and put 'em into good homes, but to show the public that these are amazing horses.

They have a strong sense of self-protection, they have a lot of intelligence.

- That they need our attention, they need our care, they need our involvement.

There are some people that would like to have them eliminated.

There are some people that want them to be free without any kind of management.

They will double in population every four to five years if they're left alone.

There are lots of solutions that are needed in order to preserve them for generations to come.

(audience cheers) - It's a packed house, thousands of people.

The music is loud and we've gotta get these baby mustangs in there and act like we're totally calm and collected.

Obviously, I'm never gonna be able to replace what he had in the wild.

I think he had a great life in the wild, but I think he would say that he likes it here.

And I hope he would say that he's happy.

Say a prayer for the cowgirl Her horse ran away She'll walk til she finds him Her darling, her stray But the river's in flood And the roads are awash And the bridges break up In the panic of loss And he comes to her hand but he's not really tame He longs to be lost, she longs for the same And he'll bolt and he'll plunge Through the first open pass To roll and to feed In the sweet mountain grass Or he'll make a break for the high plateau Where there's nothing above and nothing below It's time for their burden, the whip and the spur Will she ride with him Or will he ride with her - [Mary] You could call it an odyssey that really brings you to this other level.

Coming up to Wyoming, seeing the Mustangs in their habitat was that final piece of the puzzle for me and one that I didn't realize how much I needed to do.

And I'll pick out a tune and they'll move right along And they're gone like smoke And they're gone like this song (audience applauds and cheers) Say a prayer for the cowgirl (audience continues to applaud and cheer) - [Announcer] That is Mary Kitzmiller and the horse underneath her is Remington.

- The mustangs, they never disappoint.

So I was really thrilled to see what they showed up with this weekend.

It was fantastic.

- [Announcer] The 2018 Champion of the Extreme Mustang makeover is Nate Eicher.

(audience applauds and cheers) - I definitely wanna bring Remington back home with me and quite simply, he's the best mustang I've ever ridden.

- (indistinct).

(audience applauds and cheers) - He's not a horse that I had to fake a lot of stuff on to make him look this good.

He just really is this good.

He is a great horse and I'm just happy to be taking him home.

(emotive piano music) - To me, the importance of the mustang really shows the relationship of humankind and the horses.

- They can cross from wild to companion.

There's this fluidity that we can step into their social circle and they will admit us.

That is very unusual in the animal world.

- So after the adoption, a man from north Texas won the bid on her.

I'll follow her.

I'll come and visit her when I come down here.

You know, I do that with all the mustangs that I've worked with, but you can't keep all of them, you know?

After this 100 days, you know, of them learning to trust you, you come here for this weekend and they give you the most that they've given you the whole time and then right afterwards you, it feels like you abandon them, you know?

At least I hope they don't see it that way.

But that's what it feels like.

You know, that's what makes it hard.

(emotive piano music continues) - It is very emotional.

It's because you put your entire life into this horse's life.

It is a connection that you create with them.

And when you walk away from that, it's like losing something that's very near and dear to you.

These aren't just throwaway horses.

They have a voice.

- I believe you're ready to go home.

- [Wylene] They have purpose.

- I think the Extreme Mustang Makeover has allowed the public that maybe might not have understood that you can take a wild horse and actually turn 'em into a willing partner.

(mellow country music) - Operation Wild Horse is a community of veterans and military families that come together to experience the healing powers of wild mustangs.

(mellow country music continues) - We're trying to help mustangs one mustang at a time, I think.

As a mustang person, the best thing we can do is show how amazing they are.

Our facility is 10 acres.

We've got 33 stalls on the property.

We currently have nine mustangs in Operation Wild Horse.

I think we're very unique to a lot of different equine programs for veterans because of the camaraderie that we have between the people in the program.

Everyone feels like they're a part of our family.

- This morning, every Saturday we do veterans camp where veterans come in, learn basic horsemanship, meet everyone and then we do some type of horse exercise for the day.

Yeah, we're crazy excited.

So Brittani Johnson and her boyfriend, Trace, are here from Texas.

They're actually the ones that trained Pearl Snap, now Pearl Harbor, in our program.

So we picked him up from the Extreme Mustang Makeover in Texas.

- Come on, Bella.

- Come on, Bella.

Yay, let's go.

Brittani's gonna do a clinic and get to actually see who she spent 100-plus days with that she hasn't seen since she's, we picked him up in Texas.

- It's your mama.

- Before we went to Fort Worth, he was getting cranky and he was getting pushed on pretty hard, you know?

But we were trying to get ready for the show and since he has been here, I can tell he is very happy.

So a year ago he was a wild animal, weren't you?

Not so wild anymore.

- And if you think about the journey that he's gone through in the year that he's been out of the wild, it is nothing shy of amazing.

(Brittani laughs) - Do not.

- And without Brittani picking him, I don't think that he would be the horse that he is today.

He's got such a kind heart.

- Yeah, what's up buddy?

Don't worry, I'm not getting on you.

I weigh too much.

(Brittani laughs) - The reason that I started Veterans R and R and progressed into Operation Wild Horse was because when I got out of the service, there wasn't really that many resources that we knew about.

My family had endured a suicide of one of our family members and that really struck me when I started learning how many veterans were committing suicide.

I didn't think that I could tackle the suicide problem across the nation, but I know that locally I can work with veterans so that we could at least work with one veteran at a time.

If we can save one individual, it's worth it to me.

(contemplative piano music) - This weekend we had the opportunity to introduce Pearly to everyone who's part of Operation Wild Horse.

We have everyone sit around the arena.

It was very interesting with him.

Every mustang that we've done this with has had a different reaction.

He didn't show nervousness at all.

And then we came together as a herd and he was drawn over further to us and he was like, I'm not totally sure that I'm welcome in your herd yet, but I'm gonna get as close as I comfortably can.

- I think that they have that mentality, like they're wild.

I've been in the wild, I gotta look out, I got, what's gonna kill me, what can I kill?

What's next?

And they have that same mentality and here we are, here we are trying to learn how to behave again together.

You gotta behave, so I gotta behave too.

And I think that's the connection there.

It's becoming civilians together.

- When we were done with that, Brittani had the opportunity to do a demonstration and show him being ridden.

And there was a lot of oohs and ahs from the audience and clapping and you know, they're just amazed what this horse has been able to do in the 120, 130 days that he's really been in a domestic setting.

(audience applauds) - Today was supposed to be the day that everybody kind of accepted Pearly into their program, you know?

But I think that he was already accepted at this point.

- Hi, I'm Ryan Bentley.

This is my wife, Kim.

I'm Marine Corps, '98 to '06.

Served in combat operations in Iraq with the famous Mad Ghost 224.

- Oorah.

- Oorah.

- Ryan is 100% service connected from his time in the military.

He has PTSD, he has a traumatic brain injury and he has some physical challenges both in his back and his legs from the different experiences that he had when he was in country.

- What made you think to keep a diary while you were in Iraq?

- Just the craziness of the place.

Like as I can remember, all that stuff is so overwhelming.

So every night I'd try to put something down of what we've done while we're there.

- Goes to my family in the event of my death.

- It's a lot different than I thought it was gonna be, to see how bad people can be two to three times a day.

They would mortar our base, they were bomb makers, there were suicide vests, there was car bombs, there was artillery shells, 155 rounds, huge artillery shells buried under the asphalt.

Don't know what it's gonna blow up.

I've got in there, the first elections in Iraq that we helped set up.

There's movies out there and little films about us called the Mad Ghost.

The enemy named us that.

So it's great to look back at it and see how we evolved and how things changed.

The other downside of it is it brings you back to that place of that.

Yeah, not so much like a depression, but that feeling of, I made it through it and a lot of my buddies didn't.

So there's a lot of guilt in that book too.

- Sox is a Nevada Mustang, and first day I met her, it changed my life.

Here we go.

Oh, good girl.

This right here is a partnership that we have and it has helped me with my issues and hopefully I've helped her out with her issues.

Whatever weight I had on my shoulders, like I can breathe.

- That's why we believe in alternate therapy.

Alternate therapy doesn't mean take some type of medication.

Alternate therapy is a wild mustang.

The ability to come out and experience something that's completely natural, natural in the wild, natural here.

(placid music) So one of the biggest challenges that I'm faced with is I don't get to see what these veterans look like before they come in here.

And when they get in here, there's an immediate change that takes place.

- Richard Durant, US Army 1984 to 1992.

But when you come in, you're dealing with the wild mustangs and if you're having a really bad day, the mustang can pick up on that.

And most of them I find are a little bit more attentive to you when you're having a bad day, and when you're in a good mood and everything's going right in your own head and your own heart, the mustangs pick up on that too.

- It's a bond, it's a trust, it's a relationship.

It's like they're looking inside your soul and they're making you think about things that you didn't realize.

Good.

Asking Shrimpy to jog again.

- It's like the horse confides into them and they confide into the horse and they, you know, you could talk to the horse and kind of tell 'em just about anything you want to tell 'em.

- This is Peanuts.

Peanuts I guess is about 14 years old.

She's blind in the left eye.

So whenever I'm traveling down the wall with her left side against the wall, her complete trust is on me because she can't see the wall and I trust her because I can't hear outta my left ear.

So we work with each other.

Ready, go, come on.

- Just do it in walking.

Take your time.

Good, line up.

There we go.

Good.

Trust is a huge thing for the horses as well as our veterans.

Depending on the generation of veterans we're working with, obviously our Vietnam veterans, when they came back, they didn't get the big welcome home that our veterans today get.

So I think that they feel like a little bit of an outcast sometimes.

And I think our horses are exactly the same way.

Looking at your timing with the other horse.

Good.

I spend a lot of time with Jack and Marty.

- Easy.

- They come out three days a week.

- Easy.

- Slow.

- Easy.

- There we go.

- I served with the Marines in Vietnam and when I finally got out of the Corps, I found it very difficult to get along with people.

- And the things that I've learned about Jack, I say we're talking about the wrong individual.

The Jack that I know is the happiest guy that I've ever met.

Yes, Jack is a Force Recon Marine.

I've never personally asked him.

He's talked to me about some of his experiences, but I can tell you this, from learning that Jack told me that he, I said, "What do you think you're getting from this organization, Jack?"

And he said, "Well, I'm not throwing people off of bar stools anymore."

And I turned and laughed and thought, that's kind of funny.

He's a funny guy.

And he goes, "I'm completely serious, Jimmy."

And I said, "Wow, I didn't realize it."

And he said, "This place is providing me the ability to not be angry anymore."

- I wish I would've done it so much sooner than what I did.

(Jack sniffs) Thank you.

(Jack exhales) Giving me back my life.

(peaceful acoustic music plays) (Jack sniffs) It's up.

- I can hear the emotion.

I could hear him crying and he just needed a minute.

And then when he finally let me come over and hug him, I said, "You know, why don't we go outside and we'll take a walk."

And we went out through this door and it was just him and I walking around outside and he was like, you know, "I just, I don't know where this all came from."

He goes, "It just, you know," he said before that he's done more healing here in the time he has been with Peanut than he had in five years of therapy.

And I looked at him, I said, "Jack, you've never had the opportunity to heal because you were never allowed because you could never talk about some of the things that you've been through."

And it was just such a moment that I hope that resonates with Jack like it does with me.

(stirring acoustic music) - With great honor that the veterans of Operation Wild Horse and Veterans R and R present this letter of appreciation to Brittani Johnson.

Your knowledge, skill, and commitment to Pearly is a testament to your devotion to horses, especially mustangs.

So we also want to present you with this certificate of appreciation, recognizing you for the dedication to veterans active duty.

- Thank you.

(audience applauds and cheers) What more noble cause can a horse have than to be here with y'all?

So I would do it a million times over again.

(audience applauds) - I'm so fortunate to have experience with so many different breeds of horses, but I can tell you there is something so magical and so free about being on a mustang.

- Mustangs can look into your soul.

- Jimmy and Patty, they kind of take a special place in me just because of how genuine they are.

Here you have two people who've opened up their lives and their everything.

It's about the brotherhood, it's about that kinship.

- My name is Phil Sweeney.

I served in the Navy from 1977 to 1981 as a navy corpsman.

Veterans went to war, they came home.

We didn't get any compassion at times.

This breaks it down.

Why is it mustangs that are better?

Mustangs have been through the same trauma as we have at times.

We don't want to see things wasted.

You know, life wasted is a life wasted.

A horse wasted is a horse wasted.

But if we could take a life that needs a little improvement and a horse that needs a lot of improvement and put 'em together, have 'em pair up, we end up one plus one equals three.

- I'm very proud to be a veteran.

(stirring acoustic music continues) - If you divide the history of the mustang into three parts, the first is when they spread all over North America.

And the second is when the frontier came in and essentially winnowed them down to near extinction.

And the third is really the 1971 law and what has happened after.

And that is that we decided to stop the destruction and preserve these animals.

And what happened is that slowly at first and steadily since the population started to increase.

- [Newsreader] Congress passed a law in 1971 protecting wild horses.

And now there are more than 42,000 of them.

There has been, according to the Interior Department, a wild horse population explosion.

- [Newsreader 2] In the eyes of many animal lovers, these horses, thousands of them running wild over the Western ranges, are a thing of beauty, an American heritage that should be let alone.

But in the eyes of cattle ranchers, the horses are a nuisance destroying valuable grazing land.

- [Newsreader 3] Despite 10 years of effort and $130 million spent, government attempts to intervene to reduce the number of wild horses to 30,000 have failed.

- I remember being out at a roundup and talking to a guy there who worked for the Bureau of Land Management and he was watching the horses being driven into the corral.

And he looked at me and he said, "This here, we're just filling buckets and no one's figured out how to turn off the spigot yet."

- There's 80,000 wild horses on the range.

We can't adopt 'em all.

(horse whinnies) That's just kind of barely scratching the surface.

The horse has no natural predator.

- And we did that to protect livestock interests.

You can't be in the cattle business if the wolves are eating your cattle, period.

But when we did that, we also made it safe for wild horse herds to grow unbounded.

There is no control on them except for exhausting the environment of all its resources, which is something that we all wanna avoid.

(horse whinnies) So what do you do?

How do you get out of this mess?

My big takeaway after spending a number of years thinking about and studying this is that there's hope and I think there are ways forward.

(tranquil music) - My name is Stella Trueblood and I'm the field manager for the Sand Wash Basin Advocate Team.

We are volunteers for our non-profit and our primary purpose is herd documentation of every horse that's out here and fertility treatment, which involves darting all the mares.

In Sand Wash Basin, we have approximately 750 horses and that includes 320 mares and fillies.

And out of those, 280 of them potentially could have had foals and we have kept the birth rate to 102 foals, which is pretty darn good.

The Basin only has so much sustenance for the horses and by reducing their population growth, we aim to keep them free.

Good to see you.

So the Humane Society darted mares in 2008 at the last large gather and then SWAT took over the program in 2014 and we've been doing it ever since, nonstop.

The weather's gonna be really nice.

To start a fertility treatment at this point in time, you need to have a lot of volunteers that are willing to drive to a rather remote area and dart horses.

Darters are out on the range during the summer just about every week.

None of us knew each other before we started coming out here to Sand Wash Basin.

(soothing country music) So we need to get some practice shots in.

Most of us are at least 60 years old, but I think we have a youngster who's maybe 50, I'm not sure, but most of us are 60 or 65 or 70.

So yeah, we are a bunch of grandmas and we are out darting.

(dart pops) - Hey.

- Nice.

(dart pops) - To the right.

- Kayla actually is our trainer.

She is from the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Montana.

(dart pops) - I get to train folks in what we do with PZP.

It is a vaccine, it's called Porcine Zona Pellucida.

It's a glycoprotein made out of pig eggs that essentially blocks fertilization.

- So by darting the mare with this mixture here, we're gonna prevent pregnancy in that mare.

- You start out with a primer dose.

Their immune system has to recognize the PZP.

And so after two weeks, then you give them a booster dose and then every year after that you give them a booster.

- Darting is a commitment.

We've gotta go after every mare, every year and it's hard work.

We don't get paid for what we do.

The BLM pays for their darting expenses.

They do pay for the PZP and antigen and darts and guns.

We pay as individuals ourselves our gas money, but it doesn't begin to touch the amount that we spend out here and the wear and tear on our vehicles.

Tires, we go through tires like crazy.

So when we dart, we're looking for approximately 320 mares at this point in time on 160,000 acres.

Once we've identified the mare, then we again look at our database to determine if that mare has been treated before.

- So in that band you have two.

So if you lose the chance to get one, you can pick up another one.

- We keep adding to that as foals are born and we have new fillies that potentially in the future will be darted.

If we can get within 40 yards, we will take the shot.

It's ideal if we're closer.

(dart pops) Retrieve darts, go back to the vehicle, drive up the road until we find the next family band and repeat the process.

And we can do this for 10 hours in a day.

So PZP costs approximately $30 a dose and to remove a horse, the BLM will tell you it costs $50,000 for the lifetime of that horse to keep it in holding.

- Economically it's way more feasible to do PZP than to pull a horse out of here by helicopter roundup.

Got her.

Then if they don't adopt it, they're gonna put it over into long-term holding.

Why not work the program that says we don't have a new horse.

We can keep 120 to 150 horses a year from ever dropping on the ground.

That's a savings all the way around.

- It's BLM land for a reason.

It's not good land.

If it was good land, it wouldn't be owned by the federal government.

There isn't a lot of food.

You can see the little bits of grass that have grown here, but there's an awful lot of dirt.

And even though it's huge, you can see the majority of it is sagebrush.

So in this area, there's virtually nothing for the horses to eat.

But these mustangs are extremely strong and they survive high heat temperatures in the summer and extremely cold conditions in the winter.

I think it was a recorded low of minus 65, about 15 miles down the road in Maybelle.

They're already scrounging for what forage is left and they have to get through the winter too.

So I'm not sure what the winter will bring for these horses, but they're amazing survivors.

I mean, they truly are.

It's amazing to come out here in early spring and see these horses that have survived the conditions that they have over the winter.

- We have three out of five sheep ranchers that don't even use this land.

They don't even use their grazing rights.

And it's not because of the horses that there's no grazing, it's because of the drought.

It's the land has been depleted over the years and that we do, and I'm not saying we don't have too many horses, I'm just saying we need to cut the numbers down so that we don't have to see major roundups happen in this basin.

- This would be why we want to get her.

(dart pops) Got her, woo-hoo.

So this is why we do this.

We just walked up on a stallion breeding a mare.

So fortunately I was able to dart her and we just prevented another foal from next year.

- They have to live within this system.

We have worked with the BLM and they've seen the progress that we've made because we've reduced the birth rate of foals by half the last three years, actually.

Born with a rebel soul No one can control They'll try but they won't break your spirit down They can't hold you back You're too fast for that No, there's just no chance They can't catch you now You're not giving up You're not giving in That's a battle that they'll never win Never gonna tame you Never gonna break you Never gonna take you down No one's gonna fetch you in Can't throw a rope around the wind You were born to stand your ground - This band has two mature mares and they have already been darted.

We're not looking to dart them again this year.

It is the way they're meant to be and it's one of the best things you can see out here.

No one's gonna fence you in Can't throw a rope around the wind You were born to stand your ground Too late to stop you now It's too late to stop You now - I hope people realize that the wild horse is really an amazing asset and that we have a chance right now at a turning point to manage it in a way that really pays honor to its wildness, which we have struggled to do for at least a generation.

- Here they come.

My name is Neda DeMayo and I'm the president and founder of Return to Freedom.

Return to Freedom is a national wild horse conservation organization, and we also operate the American Wild Horse Sanctuary, which is home to over 500 wild horses, most living in their natural family bands.

Spans about 5,000 acres in four different locations in California.

A six-year-old created Return to Freedom.

When I was six years old, this is what I always wanted to do.

I saw wild horses being chased by helicopters on television in the '60s.

I was really upset by it and I knew then that when I got older, I really wanted to create a sanctuary.

So this is why I do this.

There's something about protecting wildness.

These horses have come from all over the Western United States and they were once wild and free.

They were born wild and free, but the numbers on the range are growing.

Horses are reproducing.

The population hasn't been managed and the need for sanctuary unfortunately exists.

It would be nice one day that the range was their sanctuary.

It should be their sanctuary.

You know, I started Return to Freedom in 1998.

I wanted to create an environment where people could come and learn about the horses from the horses in an environment that's as much like a natural lifestyle as we could provide, living in natural family bands in nature's classroom.

The goal here is to really learn a little bit about the issues that the wild horses are facing on our public lands today and our work here at the sanctuary to provide some of the solutions that we hope can be applied there.

If it wasn't for the kids in America, the 1971 Act never would've passed.

That was literally letters from kids and it was orchestrated and driven by a woman named, that we call Wild Horse Annie, Velma Johnston.

And so that is one of the incredibly powerful things that we get to tell the youth of today, is that your voice matters and what you think matters.

- They live in pastures like this just without fences.

- These guys have been through a lot, you know?

On the range that this horse was, it was pretty depleted and he was quite young and very thin, and he endured a roundup of over 230 horses.

(dramatic music) In 2016, we took in 10 horses that had been rounded up from the Cold Creek area in Nevada, which is part of the Wheeler Pass federal Herd Management Area near Las Vegas.

- The reason that there was an emergency gather was because we had been in drought for 10 years.

Cold Creek had the water but had no forage for the horses.

They were skeletons.

There was approximately 230 horses taken off the range.

About 28, I believe, had to be euthanized for renal failure.

There's not a whole lot you can do at that point.

And we were still in a drought.

The horses were totally suffering out there.

- Now again, there was a removal in 2018 and we've now taken six more from that removal.

They were transported and kept at the BLM's holding facility in Ridgecrest for almost a year together.

(dramatic music continues) - Three are gonna be adopted out and three are staying here at the sanctuary.

Oh my gosh.

Annaline.

I'm so happy she's safe.

I have a very good memory of Annaline.

She was born in 2013 and I've known her from birth, so that's what, seven years now.

- Oh, that is amazing.

- Yeah, they're my babies.

Good girl.

You're going to go see everybody in a minute.

Yeah.

They symbolize America to me.

Strength, family bonds, freedom and I get to watch her out of the corral.

Into the wild, baby girl.

Good girl, go baby, good girl, go, go, go.

Woo.

Yes.

Where'd they go, where'd they go?

- They went down in there.

(camera shutter clicks) - That was good.

Here they come, here they come, go.

- They're going that way.

- Oh my God.

- Look at her, she's out there in front and the two boys are hanging back.

This is the moment.

They just connected.

What made me cry back there was this right here, to watch them get released into more or less freedom again, it's full circle.

- [Neda] There is a place for relocating horses, for sure.

And I also think that if fertility control had been implemented in the Cold Creek area years before, you could have avoided a lot of the die off.

- When I first started documenting them, I was one of the ones that said, leave 'em be, nature will take its course.

But in 2015 when I saw nature take its course, it's a whole different ballgame.

Something needed to be done.

But if you can keep some of the birth rate down, hopefully we will have less roundups and hopefully we won't have overpopulated, overgrazed ranges.

Until then, I think someplace like Return to Freedom is really important because our wild horses are in a very safe place where running free is what they're used to.

Bye, Miss Annaline.

- The Bureau of Land Management's almost 50 years of management through capture and removal, that policy just really hasn't worked.

In 2018, 90,000 horses were being considered for mass euthanasia.

Things were starting to hit a threshold.

We can't keep kicking the can down the road.

Something has to be done, and if you're not addressing the reproduction, then you're not really solving the problem.

We are able to use fertility control vaccines so that the horses can live as they're naturally designed to live without overpopulating the sanctuary.

When we started 19 years ago using the vaccine, we have been able to have a 91 to 98% efficacy rate.

(dart pops) - The BLM has never allocated very much of its budget towards fertility control.

At a maximum, it was just under 4% of that budget.

(dart pops) But when you're looking at a budget that is struggling to just care for horses that are in short and long-term holding, almost 70% of the budget every year goes towards that.

There isn't anything for fertility control, so we have to shift all of that.

- It is no easy feat.

So I do understand logistically the challenges that the agency faces when looking at, you know, implementing something like this across millions of acres.

In some ranges you've got easier access to the horses, and in other ranges it's very hard to access them.

They are all different, and so every Herd Management Area really does need to be addressed independent of the other.

- This might mean things like gather, treat, release.

On the front end, it might mean doing that as part of a gather with helicopter, which nobody likes, but the numbers are big right now.

We have to keep up with that full crop.

And right now that's almost impossible.

- And I think one of the biggest obstacles is that the vaccines available are pretty much annual.

There's currently a few universities that are working on a longer acting vaccine, and I think that's gonna be helpful in moving this kind of on-range management program forward.

- You will eventually reach that balance where you are keeping up with the number of foals that are born at any one time, and then eventually you're phasing out long-term holding completely, and you're only gathering the number of horses ever that can be adopted.

And once again, gathers are an exception to the rule and not the rule.

- And it just seems like that's a far more humane effort than capture, removal and euthanasia.

- We're definitely at a tipping point, and it's not a wild horse problem.

It's a completely, 100% human-caused problem.

And what we have in front of us now is a challenge.

- We needed to sit down with basically the livestock agencies and other stakeholders who we didn't agree with.

Along with a few other national animal welfare organizations, we worked on developing some common ground, non-lethal solutions where finally for the first time have a fertility control program with congressional oversight.

The devil's in the details and we will never take our eye off the prize.

The prize is to create a sustainable management plan for our wild horses and burros on their rightful ranges.

(hopeful music) - Wild horses are part of our landscape, they're part of our historical and cultural backgrounds, but they're also animals that started right here in what is now North America.

55 million years ago, their story began here.

- [Neda] They're a part of our heritage.

They really belong here, and we need to protect them.

- You absolutely feel awe inspired by these strong, free animals.

- I've never been this close to wild horses before.

They're just so majestic and beautiful.

- I think that if I were not able to come to this sanctuary, I would've never learned about wild horses.

And that's what I think is important to remember, is that while it'd be wonderful if all of them could live in the wild, and that's all of our dream, those of us who care about the horses, we know that not all of them will, and that a lot of people will never be exposed to them unless they can see them in a sanctuary.

(warm country music) - What I love about them the most is that they only have where they stand.

That's all they have.

And really, that's all we, any of us have, you know?

So to me in a way, if you look at it in the correct way, it's freedom to know that all you have is where you stand.

- The first time I saw wild horses really in the wild, running, something so powerfully real that it was striking, it was sublime, it was seeing the power of the Earth alive and moving.

- You truly can't understand the bond with a mustang until you've had the opportunity to really spend some time with them.

And then to be able to take that love and that passion and expose other people to it, some of whom didn't even know that mustangs existed, oh my gosh, this is working.

- It is just a cool group of horses.

And there are endless possibilities on what you can get with a mustang.

Each of them is unique.

They all have their own personality.

This is a halter that Remington's gonna wear.

I've designed this myself, and this is a horse with Remington's brand and it says, "Take a ride on the wild side."

(warm country music continues) - I wanna see it get to the point where we have a stable population, not much population growth, and the horses never have to be removed from the only home that they've ever known.

- And we've gotta find a way to preserve it because in doing so, we preserve ourselves and we preserve, I think, the land that we love.

- [Robert] We have the ability to create a proud future for the American mustang.

My hope is that the strong, resilient spirit of these wild horses will inspire solutions that ensure their survival and a lasting home on our public lands.

By working together, we can preserve their legacy and celebrate their freedom for generations to come.

(placid country music) You rode into battle Barebacked and saddled You took the wound in your side You pulled the sleds And you pulled the wagons You gave them somewhere to hide Now they don't need you And there's no one to feed you And there's fences where you used to roam I wish I could gather up all your brothers And you'd just ride me back home Ride me back home To a much better place Blue skies and sunshine And plenty of space Somewhere where they would just leave you alone Somewhere that you could call home And you would just ride me back home