- You won't find a better expert in Wyoming on wild horses than Chad Hanson.

He's a Casper College professor who's the author of a beautiful new book called "The Wild Horse Effect."

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright music) (bright music) Welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

Very happy to be joined today by Chad Hanson.

And I'll point out first: he's the author of what I will describe without qualification as a beautiful new book called "The Wild Horse Effect."

If this were only a picture book, it would be fabulous because you, who were the photographer as well, have just captured, I would say, hundreds of really, really nice images of wild horses in the Wyoming landscape.

And that's where we are now.

First, tell us: how would you describe our location at this moment?

- We are on the prairie between Casper and Lander.

We are about seven miles east of Jeffrey City, if viewers know or can picture where that is.

- It's near Green Mountain, which is known to be a picnic area, camping area, cattle grazing area, and also one of the great areas, really in all North America, for wild horses.

- Agreed.

We are standing in the Green Mountain Herd Management Area.

It's home to as many as 300 wild horses.

- We've seen a lot of them today.

We got very lucky in being here.

When we arranged an interview today, one of the things that you told us was: "I'll try to take you where we can see some, "but there's no guarantee."

But this morning as we arrived, there they were.

Obvious question first.

You're an expert on this: what is a wild horse?

What's a mustang compared to, say, the horse in someone's pasture?

- A mustang is a horse that is born out here in the wild.

It's all they know.

And in Wyoming we have several areas on property that's managed by the BLM, or the Bureau of Land Management, in these wild horse herd management areas.

When horses are born here out on their own, they are considered wild.

They don't have brands.

They live in communities that they create on their own out here by themselves.

And so in areas like this, when you see a horse, it's a wild one.

You're looking at a mustang.

- So that means no veterinary care, for example.

No feeding, no shoeing, no breeding under human control.

They're on their own as wild animals.

And they do well.

- [Chad] They thrive.

You said it: they're on their own.

Every day of the year, winter, summer, the only shelter is the sky or whatever they can find among the trees and down in valleys and such.

- [Steve] How long have they been here in numbers, say, where we are, would you guess?

- [Chad] The horses who live in the Green Mountain area have been here likely for hundreds of years.

- [Steve] So the idea that some people might have that they're just recently been released or runoff or driven off for something: that's not true.

They've established themselves now through centuries.

- Yeah.

One fairly recent interesting find in the southern part of Wyoming: near the Blacks Fork River, there was a skeleton of a horse that was found that was dated to about the year 1640.

And Native people had been at that point husbanding horses.

This horse near the Blacks Fork region had been buried in a ceremonial fashion surrounded by an array of coyote skulls.

So we know that, as early as 1640, horses had been part of the Wyoming landscape.

- We know that there's been this sense of reverence, awe, magnificence.

And you talk a lot about this in your book: the horse has a special place in the animal kingdom, doesn't it?

- Horses do.

To Native people on this continent, horses were their spiritual partners.

Just about every wisdom tradition, just about every religious tradition across the world has made a point to acknowledge horses.

They have literature and lore that surround horses, and, over centuries, horses and humans have had a special bond.

- You talked about religious studies as one of your disciplines.

- [Chad] It is.

- There's a quote here from Islam, I believe.

- Yeah, the Muslim legend is that their God, Allah, gave the south wind a command, and that was: "Condense thyself."

And upon hearing that command, the south wind turned itself into a horse.

And, you know, standing out here in their habitat, you know, listening to the wind rustling: not hard to imagine why.

- I love that.

I had never read it until I held your book in my hand.

Not the only animals that are mentioned throughout history and throughout religion, but, boy, as you've demonstrated in the book, and people can read through it, you just find and reference so many poems and lyrics and essays and philosophies and speeches that have been made that bring up the horse in these particular ways.

Early in the book, you sort of by way of introduction, you quote the great poet and essayist and writer Virginia Woolf who says, I believe it's: "There's no denying "the wild horse in all of us."

- That's right.

- Could you tell us about, as you were putting the book together, how you thought to and decided to incorporate that kind of material into a beautiful picture book as well?

- I can only imagine exactly what Virginia Woolf meant when she said that there's no denying the wild horse in all of us, but I have to believe that, when she looked at wild horses, she probably saw similarities.

They're intelligent, they're social, they're admirable.

And I think when you spend time watching wild horses, it's kind of hard not to picture yourself wandering off and becoming one of them.

- [Steve] Yeah, there's an enviable situation that they have, but we know they have challenges.

But, boy, just being out here today and seeing where they are and what they're doing, there is that sense of awe.

It means a lot to you, I know.

- I teach sociology and world religions, and so I study mental health.

And I've looked at a lot of the patterns and the shifts and the changes in American mental health, for example.

And what we know is that time spent outdoors and on occasions when people feel really blown away by what they're seeing, there are mental health benefits that go along with those kinds of experiences.

And so part of the reason I wrote the book is that I wanted to give people a sense that we have opportunities like this in Wyoming.

They're free, we're on public land.

- It's known that people have mental health challenges, have loneliness issues, have connection issues, have even suicidal tendencies or thoughts sometimes.

It's hard not to stand out here and feel something beyond your little problems.

- Yeah.

- Or your big problem.

- Right.

(Chad laughs) No, being in a place like this, for me, it's easy to like imagine yourself as a small part of a much bigger whole.

And I think when we talk about the mental health benefits of things like reverence and awe, I think those are components.

Putting things in perspective.

I think places like this and creatures like wild horses really help us in those directions.

- One of the things that you stress is: in this world where technology is playing a bigger and bigger and bigger role, this idea that the world of nature, the natural world used to have this much bigger place in almost everyone's life than it does now.

Not just physically, but also here.

There was a sense that the natural world was almost a living thing that we were more a part of instead of separate from.

- You make a good point.

One of the authors that I lean on in this book is a man named Richard Louv, and he coined a phrase called nature deficit disorder.

He likens it to a mental health disorder where young people in particular but both young and old, we've gotten to a point in our society where too many of us are a little bit disconnected from our own habitat.

And he sees time spent in nature and time spent among wild animals as a way to treat that condition.

- It's almost as if some people think that's the nature of human life is that we're supposed to be.

We've developed this camera, this phone, this microphone, this shelter, this whatever, so that's what we're supposed to be doing.

And we are one of the creatures on earth that has the capacity to do all of it.

- [Chad] Right.

- If we'd remember that.

- But these are new developments.

This is a relatively new experiment.

You know, the phone life and the technological life is a relatively new thing in the scope of human history.

For tens of thousands of years, it was more like stories around the fire.

- How come they're here?

Where did they come from?

- The horses here have a mixed ancestry.

Most wild horse herds in Wyoming have been genetically tested.

So we know, for example, that some of their roots go back to the early Spanish explorers.

- They brought them here?

- Yeah.

Horses evolved in North America.

The oldest horse fossils on earth were discovered in Wyoming near Kemmerer in an area called Fossil Butte.

- How similar is that fossil to this horse we're seeing?

- The dawn pony, the original horse ancestor, was about the size of a black lab.

And they had three toes.

And so over the course of 50 million years, that animal evolved into what's now equus, the modern horse.

There was a window in North American history where horses were probably not present, and there's only speculation as to why.

The last Ice Age, changing forage, human predation.

Human beings were coming into the continent during the last Ice Age, and it's possible that horses were overhunted.

- Human beings arriving is sort of bad news for lots of animals, isn't it?

- There were a lot of mammals that we lost in that era, that's right.

Including mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.

We lost a whole host of mammals in the last Ice Age.

But we have the good fortune that horses during that same era walked out of North America into Asia and Europe.

They were domesticated, put on ships, and then sailed back to their home.

So when we're talking about Spanish horses present here, some of them were let loose in the 1500s.

- Let loose deliberately by their owners?

- Let loose, stolen, gotten loose, whatever the circumstances were, you know, horses made their way back out onto the prairies of the West, and here we have 'em today.

Over the course of the last few hundred years, cavalry horses made it into this population.

During the decade of the 1930s, the Depression, domestic horses were turned loose.

So some of their genetics have made their way into the populations of wild horses that we have today.

So they're mutts, but they're awfully beautiful mutts.

- One of the fun things about studying and knowing about horses in what we'd call the domestic realm is recognizing different breeds of horses, that a thoroughbred is different from a Morgan, which is different from a quarter horse, et cetera, et cetera.

Do we find: are the the wild horses, the mustangs identified by breed in any way like that anymore?

- Generally speaking, we refer to horses on BLM herd areas as mustangs.

- That is their breed, essentially.

- That's their breed, essentially.

But it's also easy to see: we have a variety of shapes and colors.

Wyoming is really fortunate in that we have a really diverse group of wild horses.

We have pintos, we have appaloosas, which is unusual.

Most states, even states that have wild horses, don't typically have appaloosas.

But we do.

You can see Arab traits and characteristics.

Some of the horses in this herd are large enough that it's pretty easy to see that there's draft horse genetics that have been mixed in, yeah, so.

It's a really wide range of horse genetics in this herd and most other Wyoming herds.

And that's a good thing.

Genetic diversity is necessary for the long-term health of these animals.

- Because in the domesticated horse world, it's the breeders who are deciding what a breed is gonna be.

And, out here, the horses decide that for themselves, - They are making those decisions on their own.

Yeah, they decide.

They live in family bands, and it turns out that mares actually have a lot to say about which stallions they partner with.

It's a little bit like a soap opera sometimes when you spend time out here watching the family dynamics.

- Well, that's something you had to do a lot of, done a lot of in your work.

This isn't the first book you've written.

You begin with the setting that we're in, and then this particular subject that you're getting within the setting.

As a shooter, as a photographer, gotta be one of the most rewarding things you could do, I would think.

- It is, yeah.

You said it: it's hard to take a bad picture of a horse.

I was an art major as a freshman in college, and it only took me a few weeks to figure out that I really don't have the talent when it comes to painting or drawing or sculpture.

But I figured out I do have the ability to go like this with my finger.

And we're fortunate: the landscape, the skies of Wyoming, and these incredible animals.

They're photogenic.

- One of the things you write about in the book, in fact, it's on the back here: "Horses are among the biggest "and most beautiful animals left on earth."

And that got me to thinking as well.

We saw other animals out here today.

There's cattle around here, and we think in Wyoming we see deer, we see pronghorn antelope, we see bison.

Even that's a pretty striking creature.

But, boy, the horse, with this overall physical dynamism that it has, just really unlike any other animal.

Just the tossing of the head and the tail and the mane and the limbs, everything.

As someone said in the book, you quoted it, it arrests the entire landscape.

- Their size, their speed, their stature: they arrest your attention.

And that makes them unique in the animal kingdom.

Sometimes I say that wild horses put the charisma in the phrase charismatic megafauna.

You know, they really epitomize what we mean when we use that phrase.

And I think that's part of what makes them especially good for mental health.

When you see a band of wild horses running on a landscape like this, you can't take your eyes off them.

And giving yourself something to focus on, in a really single-minded way, it turns out that that comes with a lot of mental health benefits.

- Let's talk more specifically about the book for a minute.

I think most people can understand how you got the pictures you did.

You came here, you said your wife was with you a lot of the time, and you spent a lot of time observing, waiting, being ready for the thing you're looking for and then sifting through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures to get the right one.

- Yeah, on a typical day, I would probably take between 5 and 700 photographs.

And then after that, the work begins.

I'll sift through, and there might be a half a dozen that make the short list, of keepers, images that I might like to use for a project.

Maybe I'd come away with one or two that I'd put to use.

- [Steve] Hard, isn't it sometimes?

You gotta be ruthless with your... - [Chad] You do, yeah.

- [Steve] They are things of beauty.

- [Chad] It is.

A lot of deletion takes place for sure.

The horses in the book all come from Wyoming, and I have visited a wide range of herds.

Some of them are from Green Mountain, some of them are from Stewart Creek just south of where we are today.

Some of the images are from the McCullough Peaks herd, which is up east of Cody.

- You're a college professor, Casper College.

- [Chad] Right.

- And talked about your subject areas.

But from what I can tell from looking at the book, your interests are even wider than that.

Poetry and essays, but there's science, there's health, there's environment, there's geology and archeology.

There's lots of things here, all part of this bigger topic.

And you're the one who did it, qualified to do it.

What moves you to do that?

Why is this such a topic for you?

- I went to college in Arizona.

I went to Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, and then I finished in Tucson at the University of Arizona.

And my wife Lynn and I have been here in Wyoming since 2001.

When I was a student myself, I figured out that any one thing you're trying to understand is probably connected to a whole host of other things.

And so even if the problem or the issue seems biological, chances are there's social, cultural, historical, and philosophical elements that you probably ought to think about.

So when I study wild horses, no surprise, I study history and philosophy and the arts and things like that right alongside.

- The humanities experience, everyone.

- You could say that.

- Really?

- Yeah, it's true, yep.

I think that's the best of the humanities.

You know, there's so many fields within, you know, what we call the broader humanities, and they all add something.

They help you see things from different points of view.

- I read in the book you said: "When I found out that wild horses lived in Wyoming," it changed your life.

- It did.

Full disclosure: when I first moved to Wyoming, I had been bitten by the fly fishing bug.

- Understandable.

- And living in Casper, I thought I was in paradise.

The North Platte River runs right through town.

And so for about the first decade, that seems like that's about all I wanted to do was stand in a river waving a stick.

But when I found out there were wild horses, it did change things.

And now when my wife and I have free time, we tend to spend it in places like this.

- What do you shoot?

What's your equipment?

- I have a Canon R5, which is a 45-megapixel camera.

It's one of Canon's new mirrorless cameras.

And my lens is an adjustable zoom from 1 to 500 millimeters.

It's a considerable zoom, so I don't have to get all that close to horses.

I can stand at a distance and make close-up images.

- Most of the time you're keeping your distance, and they are seeing to it that you do.

- Yeah, each horse herd is a little bit different.

In this herd, the horses see cars and people often enough that they're a little bit more approachable.

But in some parts of Wyoming, wild horses see people so seldom that they'll run even at the sight of a vehicle.

So you wouldn't really be able to approach.

- As we got here today, we saw several different bands, and a couple of them came to us.

And they didn't come right up to eat out of our hands, but they were interested.

And off camera here, we see a half dozen who have stabilized there.

They're not worrying about us.

- Horses are intelligent and they're curious, so even if they're scared, a lot of times they'll still come in for a look because they wanna know who you are and what you're up to.

- You have segments called Try This.

Some of them are fairly straightforward.

Match clouds, give someone a hug, lie down on the ground and look at the sky, I think, or something like that's one of them.

You're trying to find, as we used to say in the newspaper business, different entry points to your book so that people can get the most out of it.

- Yeah, in addition to the photographs and some of the history and science, I also have in the book some really practical suggestions.

Each subheading starts out with two words: "Try this."

And some of them include things like, for example, think like Einstein.

Albert Einstein famously saw miracles just about everywhere he looked.

He was almost constantly amazed by what was in front of him.

And so I use suggestions like that in the book.

To use your phrase, I love this, it gives people entry points or a way to start thinking or acting along these lines.

- Not just to the book but then to maybe a larger life.

- It's a way of relating to the world, yeah, agreed.

- I know something about the world of commercial printing, and the book: it's quite an object to have.

It's not a guidebook, it's not a field guide.

It's hardbound, it's on heavy paper.

It smells good.

It has the photos that go clear to the edge, and I know that means you buy more paper than you end up using.

All those things.

What was the process of actually getting it made?

- I worked with a really incredible publisher called Chronicle Books, and they have a fantastic set, a group of people who work in editing and design.

And I know the supply chain they used was international.

So the book was actually printed overseas, and that accounts for partly the high quality and partly the affordable price, so.

- I think it's very topical now to mention that among the groups that helped you was the Wyoming Humanities Council.

The logo's there in the book.

It's under some duress now through some of the federal decisions that are being made.

But for you, pretty vital, wasn't it?

- It was.

Early in this project, the Wyoming Humanities Council gave me a grant to support some of this work.

In particular, we hosted an event in downtown Casper.

It was a public forum.

And so as part of Casper's summer Art Walk series, we held an event, it included music, photography, a slideshow, and a discussion about both the history and the future of wild horses.

And, yeah, Wyoming Humanities helped make that possible, and I'm grateful.

- It's a dynamic landscape in flora and fauna.

When we were driving out, we saw rabbits, I think, and some prairie dogs.

We saw pronghorn antelope, saw some cattle.

It's BLM grazing going on here.

I would imagine in places where the wild horses are, the mustangs are, they encounter deer and elk as well.

They seem to coexist pretty well.

- We find wild horses grazing right alongside antelope.

As you said, elk.

Green Mountain has moose, believe it or not.

These wild horse herd areas are good places for birdwatching.

The Stewart Creek area just south of us is a designated raptor nesting area.

So birdwatchers can make the most of some of these places.

The only thing I recommend is that you watch out for badgers.

We see badgers out here in this part of the state.

- And they can be a little grouchy.

- They are grouchy.

They're one of my favorites, but, yeah, you see them out here too.

- Let's say I'm in Casper where you live most of the time, and I've never seen a mustang and I want to: what should I do?

- We are standing in the northeast corner of what's called the Red Desert Complex.

It's actually made up of several wild horse herd management areas.

And the hub of it is the little intersection we call Muddy Gap.

So if you were to visit Muddy Gap and travel either south or west from there, you'd be traveling along the edges of wild horse herd areas.

And if you saw wild horses from either of those two angles, if you saw horses, they'd be wild.

- It takes some effort, but it can be done.

- It can be done.

I can't recommend it enough.

The book is called "The Wild Horse Effect."

The author is next to me, Chad Hanson.

It's a work of scholarship in addition to just coffee table photography, all rolled into one.

So way to go on that.

- Thanks, Steve.

- And thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright music)