Wild Horse Book Receives Scientific Accolades

Celebrated Wild Horse Book Gains Scientific RecognitionCelebrated Wild Horse Book Gains Scientific Recognition

Wild at Heart: Mustangs and the Young People Fighting to Save Them, published by Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, blends what the heart knows with what the head needs to learn if one wants to speak out knowledgeably for wild horses.

“I wanted to open the door for readers to see wild horses’ beauty, mystery, and value,” says author Terri Farley, who worked with Pulitzer Prize winner Melissa Farlow, a National Geographic photojournalist, to create a factual work that answers hundreds of “whys” in horse history and science.

“I believe in socially responsible photojournalism. I've worked extensively in the American West for National Geographic —driving 20,000 miles for a magazine story and book on public lands—documenting mustang herds,” says Farlow. “It's important to try to make our world a better place. Photographs can take people places they might not go and show them things they might not see. My responsibility as a journalist is to show reality. My hope is to inspire people to care and to make a difference.”

From Ice Age horse hunters to an early polio treatment which disfigured Velma Johnston and led to the mocking nickname Wild Horse Annie – because her face looked like that of a horse -- to the secret stories inside mustang bands, up-to-the-minute science is the book’s cornerstone.

Though Farley's fictional Phantom Stallion books have been published since 2002, Wild at Heart springs from her journalistic experience. The book has been honored by the National Science Teachers' Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Award and is the 2015 winner of the Sterling North Heritage Award.

Interviews with leading scientists convinced Farley that horses evolved on the North American continent, “They belong here. Where humans shove livestock into horses’ ancient ecological niche, the Earth suffers. That’s why there’s a chapter called Cow Tongues & Horse Poop.”

Dr. Ross MacPhee, esteemed paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is one of the book's many fans. “Anyone who cares about wild horses should read this book. So should anyone who cares about how science is being abused to justify flawed management policies masquerading as 'responsible conservation.'”

MacPhee decries government insistence that horses are an invasive species, “To assert because of domestication they’re not the same species is farcical.”

Dr. Beth Shapiro, evolutionary molecular biologist at UC Santa Cruz, California agrees. She points to DNA testing and the mapping of genomes as factors that should change what we think we know about wild horse history, but she’s a realist.

“What a species is, is something that genetics cannot resolve in the minds of people seeking to keep them separate.”

As Bureau of Land Management press releases blame a billion-dollar budget crisis on wild horses, it’s significant that Farley includes information from the Humane Society of the United States’ 2013 analysis of BLM’s budget documents which found “…the more money Congress appropriates in response to the Bureau’s plans for reform, the more the program costs …”

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