Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/67357
FREEDOM FIGHTERS The conflict between wild-horse activists and the Bureau of Land Management has reached a fever pitch. Writer Kurt Brungardt and photographer John Kelly visit the front lines of the "mustang wars" in Colorado and discover two heroes emerging from the fray. shipped to long-term holding facilities, where they will spend the rest of their lives in captivity—they are shocked. When they learn this is a government pro- gram costing taxpayers millions of dollars a year, questions fire at a rapid pace: Who are the horses hurting? Why does it cost so much? Aren't mus- tangs protected? How can we do this to a symbol of freedom? W These questions only begin to get at the complexity and confusion over what is happening to America's wild horses, in Colorado and in other Western states. The Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of overseeing the wild horses, calls it population management. Horse advo- cates call it the "mustang wars." When it comes to the mustangs, the political gets personal quickly. The story began as a partnership—loyal cavalry mounts and companions in westward expansion—but it has become a story of industrialization, manifest destiny 21st-century style: corporate cattle, gas and oil, mining. The issue reveals deeply ingrained attitudes, much like the classic Rorschach test and its abstract inkblots. The subject of the mustangs exposes core beliefs about the environment, animal rights, and govern- ment accountability. How one feels about the government's management of the wild horses ultimately says more about an individual's ideology than about the mustangs. hen people hear that wild horses, aka mustangs, are rounded up en masse over treacherous terrain by helicopters, forcefully separated from their tight- knit family bands that took years to form, and then processed like cattle—castrated, branded, and