Throughout Ashley Avis’ Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West, there are moments that will infuriate and shock you, but you will also be moved. In my review of the film, I mentioned that I didn’t know much about horses in general–let alone the treacherous world of rounding them up for nefarious reasons–but it feels like my empathy towards the safety of animals grew tenfold as I watched it. Yours will too. By embracing an investigative journalism angle, Avis gives Wild Beauty a personal, passionate touch, and it has become one of the documentaries we should keep an eye on this season. It was recently nominated for Best Science/Nature Documentary at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards.
At the top of our conversation, I expressed that I don’t know how people can assume that animals do not feel the same things we do. Just because they cannot articulate those feelings with words in the same language doesn’t mean that their hearts cannot be filled or broken. “The nature of how some people think that animals don’t feel emotions similar to ours–joy, love, fear, and connection–I don’t understand,” Avis says.
A few minutes into her film, Avis presents a quote by Henry David Thoreau that reads: “We need the tonic of wildness. We require that all things be mysterious and unexplored. That the land and the sea be indefinitely wild, unfathomed by us, because, they are unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” It is a quote that remains active in our minds as we watch this film. Why do we need answers to everything? Why do we think we need to conquer and explore every inch of this planet? Shouldn’t some things puzzle and raise curiosity? We shouldn’t fear that as much as embrace its mysteriousness.
“The quote that really resonated with me throughout this entire journey was by Henry David Thoreau about the tonic of wildness,” Avis says. “That was very felt by me and our crew when we were out in the wild. Getting to see the horses where they belong and spending hours observing certain herds and families, you see a lot of incredible interactions. They feel very familiar. You see the father, the stallion, of a wild horse band–that’s what they are called–stand over their newborn foals or they would allow their pregnant mares rest their heads on their shoulders. We oftentimes think of horses rearing back or battling when we think of wild horses but it’s the quieter and more intimate moments that indicate that delicacy that felt like such a gift. That’s why we need to protect that and not allow that to be stripped away. It did feel like we were infused with that tonic as we were filming the entire film.”
Avis admits in the voiceover that they didn’t seek to make an expose of how these horses are treated and captured, but she couldn’t turn back once she learned was happening. We meet photographers and other advocates as well as several ranchers who shed some light on this issue. Were ranchers and farmers nervous to come forward or even speak on the issue?
“We reached out to dozens and dozens of ranchers on both sides of the issue, and there was a reluctance to appear on camera, from the agency officials from the ranchers,” Avis reveals. “I was very appreciative that Stacy Davies was willing to go on camera. He loves horses, and then at the very end he expresses that horse meat is great meat and that it has a lot of uses. If you notice, the camera goes slightly out of focus because our AC was so surprised that it was said. It was an interesting mentality from him in particular and from the other ranchers we spoke to there is a great deal of misinformation with the horses which leads to an antiquated mentality. Rounding horses up with helicopters in 2023…how is that not antiquated? It does feel that, depending on who you are talking to, the mentality is that horses are livestock, and they are not. They interact differently and exhibit different behaviors from cattle.
In certain communities, there is a hatred for those horses. There is someone in Arizona that goes into the forest and shoots the horses. There is a killer who exhibits a pattern every January and they target families of horses. In some of these areas, where the issue is a lot more divisive, it can get violent, and that was certainly something we weighed when we decided how far to push the envelope. I decided to not cross the border into Mexico in the instance when we explored the slaughter pipeline. I know the film has a bias. I couldn’t not take that stance given everything that I saw. I don’t know if anyone who is truly empathetic towards animals could not side with the horses after going through the experience that we did. The fight isn’t with the private ranchers who are grazing their cattle on their private land–if anything, they should be up in arms over these massive tax subsidies that are given to huge food corporations. They are rounding up huge numbers of horses and then saying the land cannot sustain them but then replace them with thousands cattle and sheep. Sometimes directly right after–it’s insane to me.”
When Wild Beauty introduces the slaughter pipeline, there is no going back. Avis’ team employs a button camera to casually enter an auction site where separated horse families are bought by the highest bidder. It feels like something out of an Eli Roth horror film, and it’s remarkable that Avis and her team could conceal their feelings in order to capture the necessary footage.
“The film changed quite a bit over the course of making it,” she says thoughtfully. “We originally thought we would be making kind of like an indie Planet Earth with maybe a celebrity narrator who would take people through the journey. I knew the information that I wanted to distill, and, over the years, there were dozens of outlines of how we wanted to shape the film. It was never meant to become personal. As I was editing it, I was writing the voiceover, and then we planned the trip to Texas. That was one of the last pieces we planned, and we took a lot of time considering how we wanted to handle that. It’s important to show all of that, given that thousands of horses are being flipped illegally in the slaughter pipeline, but we’ve saved horses from the buyers down there too. None of them, I don’t think, know what we look like, and once I got into the edit and I knew the film was leading us down this path, it linked to the two main round-ups. You see injustice over and over again, and it drives you to say something. It made me bolder along the way. There was this disturbing casualness from a lot of these officials who didn’t have the same viewpoint as we did. As we allowed the film to become more journalistic, we added that section in Texas.
My husband is my producing partner and he was working on something out of North Carolina–I was editing the film out of our hotel room there. When I told him that we were going to go, he was worried, and my father flew in. He was at the round-up of Sand Wash Basin in Colorado, and he was helpful in getting the gentleman who speaks with me on the phone. We never got to meet in person. My dad tracked him down, but he got nervous and disappeared. That auction is known for sending horses to the slaughter pipeline, and we didn’t know what our level of safety was going to be. I had a little DJI camera with a gimbal head that I was trying to wedge into my purse and cover with a bandana, but the gimbal kept getting stuck and it would beep. All of those little things made it feel like we were going to stick out more like a sore thumb.”
Of the many things that we should commend Avis for in this film, one aspect that I loved was how she didn’t shy away from introducing Bureau of Land Management employees who are involved. No faces are blurred. Dave Cattoor, owner of Cattoor Livestock Roundup, LLC, gleefully sets up a chair with binoculars to watch helicopters chase these horses down. Surely, those opposed to Wild Beauty‘s message would have put out a statement.
“I am definitely not a well-liked individual with the Bureau of Land Management,” Avis says carefully. At this time, there has not been a formal statement from them. [There has been] some activity on social media, and we have some stalkers through out non-profit. I was told from those who have fought this fight to expect death threats. I haven’t yet, but we definitely have people who aren’t happy with us. Certainly, calling Cattoor Livestock got some people’s attention.”
Making this film is not an empty cause to anyone involved with its creation. Avis hopes that Wild Beauty will serve as a wake-up call to those who have either turned a blind eye or for those who are new to the subject (I count myself among those who found myself doing a ton of research after I watched the film). Avis ends her film with impassioned young people who want to make their voices heard on this subject. Nothing strikes fear into the minds of an older politician than seeing a young person with an opposing ideal.
“This whole journey began with Black Beauty. I mention in the film that I grew up with horses, but I had no idea that this was happening. When I was doing research on how to modernize that classic story and Anna Sewell’s animal welfare themes, and that’s when I came across this plight. We had started filming the documentary before Black Beauty to get footage of real wild horses for that film and realized that if Black Beauty is successful, we could keep going with our film.
After Black Beauty came out, I got hundreds of messages from children and one message came from a young girl on New Year’s Eve whose horse had died. She wrote me this email after seeing the film, and she is the one in the film that says, “Hopeful and determined–Jocelyn.” She sends this beautiful message and I start communicating with her mom and her, and there was another little girl from D.C. who was fourteen at the time of filming. I have all these little pen pals now, and I have some strong connections from people who feel very impacted from the plight of wild horses. We’ve kicked off this letter-writing campaign for kids to get involved with protecting our wild world. What’s beautiful is that we have been to D.C. a few times now. I walked the halls of the Senate, and I would ask if they received the letters from kids that were sent to their office. In several of those offices, their faces would light up. John Hickenlooper’s office was one of those. Just seeing those faces light up and them knowing that those letters were not written by their parents has been a big initiative.
We are trying to protect, as we call it, wild beauty not just for us but for them, and we are encouraging children to write to their lawmakers and to learn how to reach out to their representatives in the name of wild horses. We’re asking the adults to call their members of Congress. There’s a really important bill that was re-introduced by Congresswoman Dina Titus from Nevada, and if that bill–Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act (H.R. 3656)–passes, it will eliminate the use of helicopters in the round-ups. While that doesn’t solve the greater issue, it would finally set a precedent that something is changing. It’s been too stagnant for too long, and Bureau of Land Management has gotten away with so much for so long. Everyone can empathize with animal cruelty, and we hope our film can be used as a tool to help enact that change.”
Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West is available now to stream on Prime Video. Please visit The Wild Beauty Foundation to learn more about how you can help this film’s cause.