Nona Williams’s Reviews > Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs: The Life of Velma Johnston > Status Update

How do you like this book? It sounds really interesting.

It’s excellent! At first it was a little slow getting to know the people, but Velma was an amazing polio survivor, although she was somewhat disfigured by it. She became a strong advocate for wild horses who were (still are?) brutally rounded up for the pet food market and to free up public lands for wealthy cattle owners to graze their herds on.

Thanks!

I won’t spoil the book for you, but near the end, one program to save the wild horses was to let prisoners train them and domesticate them so they could be adopted out. I’ve heard about programs like that where prisoners train unadoptable dogs so that they can learn to trust humans and be adopted out. The program benefits the prisoners and animals alike. I think it’s such a wonderful idea.

The book has some plodding portions but overall it’s well worth reading and I hope you will enjoy it too.

Yes those are great programs, loving & training an animal can be so healing and most of our prisoners have had a lot of trauma in their lives.