New book: Nobody’s Horses

If you’re fascinated by wild horses, you may be interested in a new book by veterinarian Doug Höglund, Nobody’s Horses: The Dramatic Rescue of the Wild Herd of White Sands, which documents his efforts in 1994 to manage the capture and safe movement of nearly two thousand wild horses from New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Base to an Oklahoma wild horse sanctuary. As a former intermediary between the New Mexico Correctional System and the U.S. Army in a program that uses White Sands animals to help inmates become horse trainers, Höglund was in a unique position to work on the eleven-month-long relocation project. He provides a fascinating look at the history of White Sands — “one of the most desolate, unforgiving stretches of desert in the United States,” and the site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945 — as well as of the thousands of wild horses that have lived there since it was the dominion of Comanche and Apache horsemen. His chronicle effectively shows how his efforts, along with a team of herders possessing “steeled nerves and the hand-eye coordination of an explosives expert” resulted in a successful mission “to save lives and relieve the horses’ pain and suffering, not re-create an Old West roundup for the excitement and the spectacle” — though excitement and spectacle is exactly what they find, as will readers. Link