Josselyn’s activism for horses and burros
It is little known that over 82,000 horses and burros currently roam over 29 million federally-protected acres across ten Western states. Though equines evolved on the North American continent, emerging forty-eight million years before the first human ancestor, our federal government is currently seeking to eradicate them in a systematically dysfunctional system. Driven for miles and miles in zigzag formation, at the expense of almost inevitable injury and likely fatalities, these intelligent animals are subsequently incarcerated in a network of holding facilities that currently houses over 55,000 horses and burros. Though the Bureau of Land Management’s adoption policy sounds promising, reports have demonstrated that thousands in fact are subjected to slaughter. Not only is this treatment inhumane, it also is costly. Swelling from a mere three million at the program’s inception, current management drains taxpayers of over a hundred million annually, not accounting for the additional funds spent on extirpating horses’ natural predators that maintain the ecosystem in a thriving natural ecological balance. While cattle on public lands produce less than 2% of American beef, livestock outnumber horses and burros on their designated lands in a ratio of roughly 40:1. Though cattle graze more destructively, uprooting grasses versus clipping them, readily defecate in water sources, and unlike horses and burros have not evolved for the arid Western landscape, horses are scapegoated for invasive damage. Benefitting from the flagrant mismanagement are private corporations who reap millions in taxpayer dollars; one corporation has pocketed over 31 million. This is an issue that affects and will continue to affect every American. Not only that, it fundamentally impacts the notion of our country’s ideals.
My name is Josselyn Wolf. I am an artist, an activist, and a writer. For the past couple of years, I have been advocating for the reformation of this cyclical system. I have been granted the immense privilege of collaborating with filmmaker-activists Ashley Avis and Edward Winters to engage youth in the process of demanding justice for our lands, law, taxpayers, and essentially, horses. The law that created this system, and thus saved wild horses and burros from total extinction, was engendered by the thousands of letters children and their families addressed to President Nixon in 1971. To enforce current campaigns for change, we must provide equal passion. The fate of wild horses rests in your choice to either take action, or remain passive. Please don’t let greed supersede our Earth’s true treasures once more.
Stand with the wild horses of our time.
To access further education, please visit the Wild Beauty Foundation and keep an eye out for Ashley Avis and Edward Winters’ groundbreaking documentary, “Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West” premiering near you.
