The Horse Lover: A Cowboy’s Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs
By H. Alan Day with Lynn Wiese Sneyd
University of Nebraska Press, 2014, 243 pages
When Alan Day bought an old ranch on 35,000 acres of South Dakota grassland, he was no starry-eyed idealist trying to save the west. The brother of Sandra Day O’Connor, he grew up on the Lazy B cattle ranch in southern Arizona, learned the business from the bottom up as a youngster and spent his entire career in the ranching industry. So he came armed with a sound business plan and the deep knowledge necessary to carry out his dream of running the first government-sponsored wild horse sanctuary in the United States. He named the ranch Mustang Meadows, brought in 1,500 feral horses, and began a five-year adventure that brought both exquisite joy and the most profound heartbreak of his life.
This memoir details Day’s experiences as he and his crew developed groundbreaking techniques to control the unruly herd and got to know some of the individual horses in his care. Day’s portraits of individual horses, both tame and wild, are the very heart of this book. You won’t forget the power of Saber, the huge heart of Jemima, the bravery of Tequila, the magnificence of Happy. Day’s love of these animals and the untamed beauty of the land shine through on every page. He speaks to us in a cowboy vernacular that is both colorful and elegant. The book is sprinkled with black and white photos of some of his favorite equine characters, woven among vignettes both thrilling and heartrending, including Day’s encounters with the unpredictable bureaucracy of the BLM.
Indeed, though the events in this book occur in the late 1980s, they possess an uncanny timeliness, as investigations today uncover the extent of the BLM’s collusion with moneyed interests and its callous handling of the animals under its authority—often illegally sending them into slaughter. The Wild and Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 says, “It is the policy of Congress that wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death; and to accomplish this they are to be considered in the area where presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.” When the BLM contracted with Alan Day to care for 1,500 wild horses, pressure from grazing interests already had begun to force the wild animals off public lands. A sanctuary seemed a reasonable, cost-effective, and humane way to house the unwanted animals within the intent of the law. And, in fact, Day’s experiment does stand out as a shining example of what intelligent policy could accomplish, in contrast to the huge taxpayer expense and abhorrent conditions endured by over 50,000 animals currently in the BLM’s “care.”
Perhaps someday soon the powers that be will reexamine Alan Day’s experience, so beautifully set forth in this heartfelt memoir.