EquuStyle: Who inspired you to become a photographer?
Chad Hanson: My grandfather loved cameras. I grew up watching him tinker with lenses and light meters. By the time I went off to college, it felt natural to think of the world as a subject, and to see our public land as art. I discovered “visual sociology” in school, an approach to the study of culture that uses photographs. Using photos for academic purposes put me in touch with the depression-era work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. To this day, as a teacher, I still use their images in my courses. With regard to mustangs, though, it was the work of Kimerlee Curyl that inspired me early on. As far as I can tell, she has the best timing in the business.
During the workshops that I teach, on writing and photography, I often urge students to “find their heroes.” I believe there’s value in identifying, cultivating, and curating your influences. Still, at some level, it’s the face of nature that serves as the source of my inspiration. Wild horses stare at you from behind nature’s most charismatic faces, and I find the places where they live compelling too.
EquuStyle: A central theme in your book is "awe." Could you explain what "awe" means to you and how people can benefit from experiencing it?
Chad Hanson: When I feel awe I am utterly struck by what’s in front of me. I experience a feeling of absorption in the moment. I actually become so absorbed that it’s hard to keep track of the moments as they slide from the future into the present. I enter a time-outside-of-time. I’m also set upon by the impression that I am a small part of a greater whole, and when I shift back to my normal mode of being, it’s with a heightened sense of gratitude.
My experience of awe is pretty common it turns out, and today, in places like the Greater Good Science Center, scholars like Dacher Keltner use modern techniques for measuring the chemical changes that occur when we feel blown-away. Levels of cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, tend to free-fall. Serotonin levels increase, giving rise to a sense of satisfaction. Most important to me, when we feel awed, the body releases oxytocin, a hormone that increases what we call pro-social tendencies. Under the influence of oxytocin, we grow kinder, more generous, and less self-centered. A whole body of evidence points to the psychological worth of awe, but the social benefits strike me as equally valuable.
EquuStyle: As a faculty member at Casper College, how do you integrate wild horses into your teaching?
Chad Hanson: I teach a short course called The Wild Horse Experience. The class includes two afternoons on campus. Then we load the vans. We head out to search for mustangs on a Saturday field trip. During the course, I share as much I’ve been able to learn about wild horses, but just as important, students describe their experiences with the horses in their lives, past and present. The course unfolds as a discussion about our relationships with horses, and then seemingly without fail, by the end of the class, the conversation shifts. Whether in the field, or in the van on the way home, we end up wondering out loud about American culture and values. In the end, The Wild Horse Experience always seems to turn into a dialog about our relationship to the natural world.
EquuStyle: Your words focus on honoring horses and giving them dignity. When it comes to wild horses, how do we treat them with dignity?
Anyone who shares their home with cats or dogs or horses knows that animals feel, show preferences, and possess personalities. In our barns and corrals, we bear constant witness to the intelligence, and sometimes the mischievousness of horses. We work with their idiosyncrasies. We teach them, and they learn. Day in and day out, domestic horses prove that they are both educable and capable of making independent decisions.
Ironically, for most of our history, when we studied horses in the wild, we tended to assume that their behaviors were instinctual and thus the result of biological impulse, as opposed to reason or choice-making. To this day, many biologists assume, “If you’ve seen one wild horse you’ve seen them all,” as if their behavior is simply patterned by “the force of nature.” Their actions: outside their control.
I’m glad to say, in just the past few years, things have started to change. As a sociologist, I was thrilled to see, in 2021, a peer-reviewed article in the sciences suggesting that wild horses create multileveled societies. In the same year, a group of equine subjects in an Italian study passed the mirror-self-recognition test. Horses know who they are. More important, they know who they are in relation to others. We’re just beginning to understand the social relations that wild horses form beyond their immediate family bands. We need further research, of course, but it is becoming clear that mustangs engage in almost constant relationship-building. They likely identify as part of large-scale bonded groups. They can even create and acknowledge an extended clan. In my mind, each step we take to learn more about mustangs, their intelligence and their social lives, the more success we’ll find when it comes to convincing others to see their worth and dignity.
EquuStyle: What do you believe is the most effective way to change the way wild horses are managed?
Chad Hanson: As a general strategy, the Bureau of Land Management treats wild horses—legally defined as American icons and living symbols of the West—as if they were livestock bound for slaughter. In truth, we do not even afford them that level of decency. The BLM hires livestock companies with helicopters to chase and capture our mustangs. But in agribusiness, they only use choppers to locate animals. Business people would never order a helicopter to descend on a herd of stock. If we scared cattle with helicopters, they would run desperately, and potentially injure themselves in the process. We see cattle as having value (economic value) so we take steps to assure their safety. On the other hand, helicopter roundups in horse herds nearly always end with mustangs injured and killed. There are BLM staff that schedule roundup after roundup, knowing they can expect chaos, death and brutality.
The good news: people are like horses. We are not all the same. There are BLM staff members that appreciate mustangs. Within the BLM, there are men and women who would much prefer to use humane and affordable strategies to manage wild horses. I consider it my job, our job, to find those people and to work with them. They could use our help and cooperation is contagious. I am a proud member of a coalition of petitioners in a lawsuit aimed at stopping the complete elimination of two Wyoming herds, so I understand, when we are backed into a corner, we have to appeal to the nation’s highest authorities. But lawsuits come with high stakes, and consequences that we can’t fully control. Long term, I am committed to creating situations where wild horse enthusiasts and BLM staff can work together on behalf of our mustangs.
EquuStyle: In the current environment, with traumatizing helicopter roundups and holding pens, how can citizens effectively demand an end to the violence?
Chad Hanson: I encourage citizens and horse advocates to think big—bigger than we have in years. I am a fan of a concept called the “Overton window.” In short, the idea suggests that, at any given time, there is a window, of a certain size, that limits the number of solutions to public policy problems we see as “acceptable.” Thus, successful advocates “open” the window, stretching it in the direction of their interests. In other words, it helps to ask for more than what might seem currently feasible. It’s the only way to make a proposal that feels “unthinkable” today, turn into tomorrow’s “obvious” or “sensible” approach.
I would like to see a diverse coalition of citizens and equine advocacy groups wondering, in open and public forums, “Why don’t we have a Wild Horse National Park?” What about a series of, “Wild Horse National Monuments?” How about the identification of regions that we could call, “Wild Horse Commons,” in states with adjacent herd management areas? I’m talking about large and well-studied regions, home to genetically viable herds, managed on the range through non-violent, humane and affordable means. Everyone knows that suggestions on these lines will meet with opposition, but none of these proposals will ever come about if we don’t start the conversations.
In the long run, persistent efforts in these directions might bear fruit. And in the short term, discussions about expanding protections for mustangs hold the potential to pull currently “outlandish” ideas into the realm of the possible. If we shift the conversation toward hard-to-achieve goals, then suddenly, the reasonable (but currently out-of-the-question) suggestion to halt the helicopters and treat wild horses with dignity starts to feel like “common sense.”
All images Copyright Chad Hanson -all rights reserved. Cannot be reproduced for any purpose without permission from Chad Hanson.
