In Conversation With: Julia Juster (Part II)
"People yearn for wildness and freedom—and I don’t blame them! But I often wonder about everything we've projected onto the mustang."
For us horse girls, the love for horses is deep and encompassing. Before meeting Julia, I had already been following several wild horse rescues and sanctuaries, as well as conservation organizations like Free Wild Horses and Return To Freedom. I was deeply compassionate towards the plight of these stallions and herds and donated towards causes that fought for them, fueled by work by photographers like Kimerlee Curyl and Drew Doggett who storytell so beautifully through their images. In our earlier conversation with Isabel Deprince, she also mentioned that Spirit from the Dreamworks movie was her alter ego—a classic story about a wild stallion’s fight for freedom.
In Part II of our conversation, Julia and I get into the other side of wild horse conservation by exploring our cultural and collective love for the animal, and how this influences the lens through which we see them.
Cece Liu: Why do you think wild horse conservation in the US is so complicated (or not managed at all) compared to other wildlife management efforts?
Julie Juster: I think it comes down to the way the horse defies categorization. Or rather, the way the horse fits into so many categories, and the exceptions+projections that allows. Other animals on similar landscapes are tagged and tracked. Their numbers are managed, sometimes via hunting, with very little public outcry. There aren't debates about whether or not the big horned sheep "deserve" to live on that land, or how they're treated by the people who monitor their populations for disease, relocate herds that are getting too big, and allocate hunting licenses for sportsmen who pay for a tag that goes back to to conservation. Most people don't have as emotional a connection to sheep (or deer, or elk, or other ungulates!), and they don't project the same kinds of values or family structures on them. Most people are also less sensitive about these animals dying. Or at least I haven't seen as successful a campaign for protection of bighorn sheep or sage grouse as for the free roaming horses.
Animal management looks at carrying capacity (the maximum population of any species an ecosystem can sustain) and this is the crux of the wild horse debate. On the one hand are people who believe we've already far surpassed the carrying capacity for free roaming horses on public land, as evidenced by the degradation of that land and the difficulty some herds have in finding sufficient water and forage. On the other hand, people challenge the metrics used to calculate that carrying capacity. They don't believe the numbers, or their priorities are different: horses roaming free on the range. Within this discourse, the horse gets called all kinds of names: native, invasive, wild, domestic, pest, icon...and every time I'm in the Reno or Carson City area, I see this "wild and free" animal being fed apples on the side of the road. I've seen four bands at once gallop down a hill toward water. I've seen dozens of these horses trained and adopted as fantastic and fully trained companions.
(Video by Julia Juster of a wild mustang on one of her research trips in Nevada. How close she is able to get to the horse is an indication of how desensitized tsome of these herds are to humans.)
CL: It’s often said that a horse is like a mirror, that it reflects aspects of yourself back to you. How do you think this plays into how the mustang is perceived and why so many are so passionate about protecting them?
JJ: The mustang is an American brand. It’s on classic cars, football helmets, beer cans, guitars…in other words, we put this horse on the products we want to be considered distinctly—extremely!—American. The silhouette of this horse becomes shorthand for distinctly—extremely!— American ideals, particularly freedom.
The mustang is resilient, rugged, independent, scrappy, and strong. The mustang answers to no one and lives off the land. Does this sound familiar? The mustang has come to represent foundational values of the United States, particularly the foundational values of the American West, which were forged during the period of Westward Expansion into the frontier. What too often goes unsaid is that those foundational values came at a devastating cost to indigenous peoples, often with the aid of a horse. Many of the Plains Nations developed their own significant relationship with horses, solidifying the horse as a symbol of numerous and varied indigenous cultures as well as settler American communities in the West. The mustang becomes a kind of amalgamation of all this lore: a free spirit running across untouched land. Today, given the atmospheric impacts of climate change, I’m not sure any land in the United States can really be considered “untouched.” But the mustang remains as an icon of that vision of America.
People yearn for wildness and freedom—and I don’t blame them! But I often wonder about everything we've projected onto the mustang. It seems to me like our desire to protect the “wild” horse is a desire to preserve the possibility that we humans could still be wild. And it’s so easy to romanticize wildness. The “wild” of nature can be a quite gruesome and violent place! But the horse is so beautiful, and it’s so familiar to us. In the mustang, we get both the dangerous, thrilling risk of “the wild” and the graceful, recognizable possible partner of a horse. We get to imagine that what we think is true for the horse could also still be true for us.
CL: The concept of “wild horse” is also interesting as it pertains to the laws surrounding land management. Can you tell us how this classification came about and what “wild” actually means in this context?
JJ: In 1971, congress unanimously passed the Wild and Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act. This was a pretty popular move, especially as the government was entrenched in the Vietnam War. That year, approximately 20,000 horses and burros were roaming the American West. At one point, millions of horses had roamed that part of the country, but they’d been pushed into more remote and arid places by the privatization of the plains and Texas, and for a long time it was legal to hunt mustangs. Some were rounded up and sent to Manhattan to be used for taxis! Others were shipped to slaughter plants to become dog food. The herds were depleted by the 1970s, and when President Nixon signed the bill, he said “Wild horses and burros merit man's protection historically--for they are a living link with the days of the conquistadors, through the heroic times of the Western Indians and the pioneers, and to our own day when the tonic of wildness seems all too scarce.”
The horses and burros Nixon was talking about were all descendants of the horses brought back to the Americas in the 15th and 16th century. I say brought “back” because the horse did evolve in North America millions of years ago. There were many species of horses then! All but one died off in the same mysterious extinction that killed wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. The horse we know today is an ancestor of the species that crossed the Bering Land Straight into Eurasia and was domesticated in what is now Kazakhstan.
When Spanish colonial forces arrived in the Americas, they brought horses with them. Those horses spread, some through purposeful trade or settlement, some because they were abandoned or escaped. By the time the 1971 Act was passed, the herds of free-roaming horses in the west were a mix of those descended from Spanish breeds, those that had been bred by indigenous peoples, and abandoned ranch horses across the west. I’ve seen “wild horses” for sale in 2025 with the classic roman nose of a draft horse or the spots of an Appaloosa! “Wild” is not necessarily a behavioral or genetic categorization. It’s a legal label that places that animal under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. Terms like “feral” or “free-roaming” might be more accurate, but they’re controversial.
CL: Even the classification of “wild” plays into the fantasy of the horse as this constantly moving, spirited animal that is untameable. How do you see the dissonance between this and the reality of the horse?
JJ: Even—maybe especially—people who spend all day on the range observing herds of mustangs will tell you that the horses are not always running. They’re most often doing what all horses spend the day doing: eating! Or rather looking for something to eat. More often than they’re running, horses are standing, grazing, sleeping and shitting. They have bursts of energy: they play and buck and zoom around a bit. Then, in the absence of a threat (real or perceived), they go right back to standing.
If we only ever think of the mustang as an animal in glorious motion, we ignore the parts of it that make it more living being than brand. Focusing on the majestic idea of the mustang means losing sight of its reality: the needs of this particular animal, and the interconnected relationship between the actual horse and the various ecosystems it has found itself in. I worry the symbol of the mustang is being protected more than the animal itself, which has devastating impacts for both horses and other species.
When horses gallop, all four of their feet come off the ground. If we only ever picture the mustang in motion, we’re literally ignoring what’s beneath its hooves. How healthy is that land it’s actually standing on? What other plants and animals are trying to live there? When the horse stops running, does it have enough to eat? Is it running alongside a major highway or through a livestock grazing area or toward a lithium mine? And what does that have to do with us? After all, how did that horse even get there? ✦
Our biggest thanks to Julia for her incredibly thoughtful insights to an infinitely nuanced issue. In the serendipitous way that horses always seem to bring like minds together, we are truly grateful for this conversation and the questions that it left us with.
We’ll keep you posted on the imminent publishing of Julia’s book, which will definitely be at the top of our reading lists! In the meantime, check out her beautifully written essays Rendered and Trash Elegies, both addressing personal emotions that arose during her research into wild horse management in the American West.
