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3. “Cruel and Unnecessary”

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A woman wearing a neon yellow safety vest and sunglasses smiles at the camera. Six wild horses stand in the background along the brown hills of the Virginia Range.
Ashley Ahearn
Tracy Wilson is the Nevada state director for the American Wild Horse Campaign, a mustang activist group that has sued the BLM to stop roundups in the past.

The BLM often uses helicopters to round up wild horses and get them off the open range. The images and videos are hard to watch: groups of horses racing through the sagebrush trying to escape, foals separated from their mothers. Some get caught in barbed wire or are injured and have to be euthanized. Activist groups say the roundups are cruel and should be stopped. Ashley visits with activists in Reno who claim fertility control (read: mustang birth control shots) are the solution to keeping wild horse numbers in check. Perhaps easier said than done. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Ashley keeps fattening Boo up and wonders if he had a choice, would choose the easy life or the wild life?

A transcript of this episode is available.

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