Wild horse advocacy photography: Visual storytelling for multispecies justice

Abstract

The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 promised to protect wild horse herds on federal public lands. Yet these herds are steadily disappearing from their historic ranges across the western United States, as roundups and removals carried out by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) shift populations into long-term warehousing. In response to this increasingly exterminative management regime, implemented largely on behalf of extractive industries like ranching, wild horse advocates engage in empathetic visual storytelling on behalf of multispecies coexistence and flourishing. Drawing on Eva Meijer's interpretive framework for rethinking human perceptions of nonhuman animals, we argue that wild horse advocacy photography operates as a situated practice that actively constructs meaning by making lives, relationships, and moral claims visible. Through the circulation of evocative images paired with narrative captions on social media, advocates foster recognition of wild horses as sentient beings with both intrinsic and relational value, while also contesting prevailing approaches to public lands governance. By juxtaposing the vitality of free-roaming horses with the violence of capture and confinement, this photography reveals the stakes of BLM management practices. This form of visual communication aligns with multispecies justice scholarship that emphasizes the role of affective engagement—cultivated through art and storytelling—in reshaping ethical and political relations across species boundaries. By foregrounding the subjectivities and lived experiences of wild horses, advocacy photography not only challenges dominant management paradigms but also invites audiences to critically examine the sociopolitical structures that shape human–animal relations. We contend that wild horse advocacy photography constitutes a meaningful form of cultural and political intervention in the struggle for more convivial multispecies futures on western rangelands.