Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs

The new bio of Velma Johnston both inspires and frustrates.

Many people experience a sense of learned helplessness, a feeling that they are powerless and their actions meaningless in the face of global forces. Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths offers a useful corrective with the story of Velma Johnston (1912-1977), who overcame the childhood polio that left her with a twisted body and persistent pain, and launched an effective grassroots movement for the protection of wild horses. In 1950, on her way to her job as insurance-company secretary in Nevada, Johnston was traumatized by the sight of a truckload of bleeding, mutilated horses being taken to a slaughterhouse. That incident inspired her lifelong activism.

In the late 19th century, millions of wild horses roamed the American West, but only a few thousand now remain. Many were captured and killed for the commercial pet food industry that developed in the 1920s. Ranchers viewed the horses as pests that infested public lands they wanted to use for cattle grazing. Using planes and helicopters, mustangers herded the terrified horses into pens and often deliberately crippled them to prevent their escape.

Johnston’s early interventions, with her husband, consisted of what is now called direct action: liberating the horses from these pens and saving their lives. Today, it is likely that industry would brand Johnston an “eco-terrorist” and that she would face severe penalties under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. However, most readers will applaud her actions to save the lives of those animals. In similar circumstances, who would not open the gates?

As a biography, much of the book describes details of Johnston’s personal life, but it also describes her persistent efforts to publicize the plight of wild horses, engage public sympathy, especially through campaigns among schoolchildren, and lobby for protectionist legislation. Largely due to Johnston’s work, the U.S. government passed Public Law 86-234 in 1959, prohibiting the use of motorized vehicles to hunt wild horses and burros on public lands. The broader protection Johnston advocated did not come until 1971, with the Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, which prohibited capture and endorsed preservation of wild horses as “living symbols” of America’s national history.

Unfortunately, the protection that resulted from Johnston’s efforts was short-lived. In 1976, Public Law 94-579 reintroduced the use of motorized vehicles to capture wild horses, and in 2004, Senator Conrad Burns, whose own interests were in the livestock industry, introduced an amendment that allowed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to embark on a program of rounding up all wild horses on public lands and penning them up until they were “adopted.”

The rationale for removal is the claim that wild horses over-graze public lands. However, the habitat for wild horses has been steadily shrinking under demands from gas, oil, and logging industries and from corporate cattle ranchers. The impact of millions of cows is far greater than that of a few thousand horses. The Burns amendment allowed the BLM to sell “unadoptable” horses at auction for commercial purposes. Most of those horses were purchased by kill-buyers, who took them directly to slaughterhouses.

Former director Jim Baca charged the BLM with fraudulent practices and reported that BLM employees and managers were directly involved in these sales. In 1994, under pressure from the livestock industry, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbit suddenly removed Baca from his position for trying to protect horses. Since 2001, tens of thousands of wild horses have been removed from public lands, and the struggle to save them continues.

Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs is both inspiring and frustrating. The book demonstrates that individuals can have an impact but also that governments are always ready to serve the interests of private profiteers, and that constant, organized oversight is required.

Beyond that, the book demonstrates some of the shortcomings of campaigns that focus on particular species. Johnston’s efforts on behalf of wild horses were certainly admirable but there is no indication of any broader concerns for other animals or of consistency of ethical principles through awareness of animal rights. Throughout the book, defenders of horses are depicted wearing buckskin jackets and sitting down to chicken pot pies and never giving a thought to their contradictory behaviour. Why love one but eat the other?