Wild Horse Country, not really

By Laura Leigh on October 10, 2017

An old medicine hat stallion on the range still fighting for mares. He is what he is and he is magnificent; never give up old man.

Today the book “Wild Horse Country” by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Dave Philipps goes on sale. Does it tell the story the title promises? not really.

If you are looking for a fearless journey into “Wild Horse Country” that explains why we sit at a time where tens of thousands of wild horses could be shot by the federal government? this is not that book. The book does not lead you into a time in history where our EPA is being dismantled, industry that will destroy air and water deregulated, National Monuments are under threat; a movement building, politically, for decades. This book makes a tragic, common, mistake; it would have you believe wild horse management is not overwhelmed with politics, pandering and a part of the big picture of public land.

The book is a good beginning, but it does not follow the trail that threatens to destroy our wild horses and the land they stand on.

I had high hopes reading this when Dave sent me a copy. The concept of “servitude” and exploitation seemed to be right up front and I expected it to be an ongoing theme. It’s not.

This review is being shared again for multiple reasons.

If you think of Dave as someone being “educated” to this issue that might help you understand why this is bothersome. This book is his class level “201” term paper. Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior class; Dave just graduated his Sophomore year.

Dave wrote a piece for the New York Times earlier this year (2018, where he is employed) “Let Mountain Lions Eat Horses.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/sunday-review/let-mountain-lions-eat-horses.html

Since Dave’s book published we have been given the BLM report to Congress that does not base recommendations on substantive data; but our wild horses are simply treated like they live in a bubble as politics play as data in a world of “alt fact.” This familiar, circular, highly political dialogue, threatens to kill, send to slaughter and surgically spay mares in the field. https://wildhorseeducation.org/2018/04/27/blm-report-to-congress/

If investigative journalists get lazy why does it matter if the First Amendment exists? The basis for that amendment was not simply so you can call someone an idiot on facebook, it was for the press to guard Democracy herself. Dave got lazy. (We like Dave, but we wish he stayed more interested in digging.)

“The free press is the guardian of the public interest, and the independent judiciary is the guardian of the free press.” ~ Honorable Judge Milan Smith, Leigh V Salazar, Ninth Circuit published opinion (OUR WORK AT WHE https://wildhorseeducation.org/2015/05/11/whe-works-access-and-the-right-to-know/)

The case noted above built the case law that has been used to defeat BLM on many issues, including spaying.

WHE did not just fight for us, we fought for all. Does that mean anything anymore?

Review by Laura Leigh, 2017:

I first met Dave at a winter roundup in Nevada. Most reporters announce their arrival and show up with a cameraman. Dave came with his notebook, digital tablet and his own camera strung around his neck.

I had been getting death threats online that had spilled over into the real world.Those that sent those threats to me were part of a massive political move to silence any voice for the environment, the public land seizure movement. I was going to retreat to simply watch holding and keep distance; let law enforcement deal with it. A storm was moving in and all those not committed to the operation, either advocacy or a paycheck, would leave town in the next 48 hours.

I was also waiting for news on a massive first amendment case that I was fighting, the win came through on February 14, 2012. Dave doesn’t mention (in the book) that active case influenced the fact that we had daily observation when he attended, not the one day a week that had been on offer before he arrived in “wild horse country”. Being chased around the desert and threatened with arrest, just for trying to see horses after capture, had been an experience in Nevada before that case was filed.

So instead of dealing with the aggravation the threats presented I sat with Dave and shared coffee, for hours. He had a lot of questions but did not understand any of the context wild horses resided within. There is only one way to really understand the corruption our wild ones are caught in, to walk through it yourself. The corruption is carried on all sides of this conflict packaged in a multitude of wrappers.

Of all the things I spoke to him about the Bureau of Land Management “sale program,” where wild horses could be purchased for around $5. each by the truckload, caught his interest. I fanned it. It was a good place to begin some depth of understanding.

After months of contact with myself, and Wild Horse Education volunteers, Dave was ready to to publish. In September of 2012 ProPublica broke the story. The story linked former Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, with a Colorado kill buyer Tom Davis. Tom Davis has purchased over 1700 wild horses, shipped to him on the tax payer dime, and made a profit off selling wild horses to slaughter. Tom Davis is an old family friend of Salazar.

Instead of that moment being a gateway to begin to understand that the entire frame of wild horse management is wrapped in the corrupt shroud of “good ol’ boys,” Philipps sees the broken program as “too tempting” to exploitation for fast cash. Instead of looking at how the program is kept “broken” to serve the corruption, he meanders down an old tired path; poor cowboy (without ever looking at the permittees permit), the poor BLM with too many horses, the “wild vs feral” debate and “we need mountain lions” without any deep investigative work.

I do know that after the brilliant expose on Salazar/Davis that Philipps was treated horrifically by advocacy. I know, I get the same treatment. I also know he was threatened with a “punch in the face” by Salazar. But what colored this journey?

I begged that he look at the big picture. The political train wreck that was going to lead to the juncture we stand at today, the threat of killing wild horses and turning over management decisions to states and counties.

In 2013 I was approached by Travel Chanel to be the on camera journalist (a paycheck) interviewing people about wild horses. I suggested they use Dave instead. We got to spend a day together at another roundup at Blue Wing. I was fighting cancer at the time and he had to catch a flight out. We stayed in touch. However his book is basically the piece he did for Travel Chanel with a section on fertility control expanded. (I helped design that program, you can check with the producer. I even helped them figure out how to make it look like Dave was at the roundup when he left the day before it began because BLM changed the start date and Dave had a wedding to get to. I stayed, even though my dog was in the hospital. They would have had “no show” if I did not stay).

The political storm of today, the old sage brush rebellion, is nowhere to be found in a Pulitzer Prize winners book on wild horses. Philipps will tell you about the Animal Liberation Front and how they set fire to a BLM facility in the 90’s. Nowhere does he tell you a bomb was tossed on the NV state BLM office by the sagebrush rebels and the fear instilled by them during the same time frame. He doesn’t tell you how the public land seizure movement impacts the big picture; nothing, nada, zip, zero.

He does an in depth look at the fossil record and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that wild horses are a reintroduced native.

He does look at predation.

He looks at fertility control. He talks to Jay Kirkpatrick before he died. Jay was an amazing pioneer of humane fertility control. Jay was a friend of mine and I was one of the last people trained by him before his death.

Symptoms; not root causes.

He never looks into the design flaws in the program perpetuated on myth, something the National Academy of Sciences has been writing about since the early 80’s. The exact design flaws used to “remove and stockpile” wild horses instead of addressing the real flaws in range management because as a federal land manager you are either corrupt or scared.

He never looks closely at the disproportionate use of public land by the livestock industry and what it is doing to the land and federal managers (like a close look at the permit of the public land rancher he interviews). Domestic livestock has cost over a billion dollars in the last decade, is the largest use of federal grazing land, 66%, (wild horses only actually consume about 2% of all available public land forage in the big picture), the largest destructive use and only produces about 3% of beef. But livestock controls politics in the West. He doesn’t mention the Government Accounting Office (GAO) study of 2016 that shows that illegal use of public land by livestock is rampant. He doesn’t talk at all about the underlying violence in the American West that has been headline news on and off for decades.

The public land seizure movement is also after the resumption of mustanging (wild horse slaughter). Because management of wild horses is the federal management of a resource the states and counties want back, to kill horses for profit.

Nothing in the book about sage grouse that is impacting land management like nothing else in recent history, with wild horses in the direct target zone. The sage grouse plans contain massive power grabs by states and counties.

He concludes that to manage wild horses we need mountain lions, fertility control and maybe to kill them in holding to balance the program fiscally. We do need apex predators back. They don’t “laugh you out of the room” when you suggest it because it wont work, they laugh because it will never happen because of politics. Politics, those never discussed at length in the book, are why we are set to kill wild horses. (I want to point out I don’t get laughed out of a room, threatened maybe, but not laughed at)

We should not shoot one horse, or even talk about it, until we fix the broken federal grazing program.

When I expressed my deep, gut wrenching, off the charts, sadness that he never looked at the broken framework of public land I got an extremely disturbing reply; “I give you a big section in the book.” That reply made my blood pressure go off the charts. I gave him info he never looked at, did not accurately represent even my litigation and failed to look at the big picture. Why would my name in print make that any better?

I sincerely like Dave Philipps. Maybe some day he will write about wild horses and the politics that surround their demise. I have the pre-publish copy, inscribed, on my bookshelf. I knew that someday this journalist would write a book, it’s what he does with his work. After meeting him I looked him up and ordered his book on Afghanistan that won a Pulitzer. One of the reasons I suggested Travel Chanel bring him out was to continue his “education” because I knew someday, he would write a book.

I found it exciting that a Pulitzer winner was going to dig into the world of wild horses. But I expected there to be something in there I could say went deeper, something that might point to the depth of the unfortunate truths of our public land. For me, this book is really a sad statement, perhaps about journalism itself? The book feels like it was not a priority project, but a way to stay a published book author working to support a family as you deal with the “assignment desk.” I understand that… but my heart breaks.

I’m not saying that the book is not worth reading. What I am saying is that if you want a decent book that touches the surface, because you know nothing, buy it and read it with an eye between the lines that tells you where to use “google.”

This book could have been written a decade ago. There is no up-to-date look at the landslide. You can order it at Amazon.

Dave needs to write the rest of the book, this version is not complete.

Unfortunately it wont come before our wild horses stare down a bullet in the head held by the gun wrought of politics.

just a footnote: The Department of Defense spent over $84 million in 2014 on Viagra (that’s not a joke). The federal grazing program loses over $125. million in one year. Two permittees that were mad about drought closures cost the tax payer over 1.5 million to keep their grazing allotments open. Ryan Zinke spent more than $400,000 on travel just in one summer.

Can we stop acting like wild horses are “breaking the bank?”

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Wild Horse Country, not really

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