18 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • OCTOBER 2021
FEATURE
LONG ISLAND HORSE RESCUER
PARTNER CONTENT
Wild horses that roam America’s
Western rangelands descended from
indigenous populations and were not
all imported from Spain — an important
distinction that means mustangs
have been misclassifi ed as an invasive
species.
Those findings in a recent scientific
study are among the revelations
that Manda Kalimian, the founding
president of the East Norwich-based
nonprofit wild horse advocacy organization,
the CANA Foundation,
makes in her new book, Born To
Rewild: Triumphs of a Now Fearless
Woman, which was published on Oct.
1. Her goal is to stop federally funded
roundups of wild horses, which are
then auctioned off, sometimes to
slaughterhouses abroad.
“Even if you don’t care so much about
horses or it’s not your thing, it’s shocking,”
Kalimian says. “That was my way
of reaching out to the American people
to say, ‘Do you want your taxes spent
this way? The government is destroying
our environment and our wild
horses along with it. And you don’t
even know that nearly $116 million of
your tax dollars is going to this.’”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Land
Management (BLM), more than 51,000
rounded-up wild horses and burros
are being penned at government
holding facilities as of August. More
than 86,000 still roam rangelands in
10 Western states as of March, including
California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah,
and Oregon, according to the BLM.
The BLM, which oversees 177 herd
management areas, has been herding
wild horses with helicopters, storing
them in pens, and putting them up for
adoption for the past two decades.
Kalimian’s book comes amid the
50th anniversary of the 1971 Wild
Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act,
which tasked the federal government
with managing the nation’s mustangs.
She spoke with the Press about the goal
of her advocacy, why the public should
back her efforts, and what comes next.
This conversation has been edited for
clarity and length.
What inspired you to write your
book? The inspiration for the book
was to share my journey and who I have
become because of it, and in doing so
educate the public as to what the issues
are — why the horses need our help,
what’s happening environmentally;
and why public rangelands, the environment,
and the wild horses are
critical to our survival.
What are you hoping that readers
take away and learn from reading the
book? They should know this is what
the government is doing. This is how
your taxes are being spent, and this is
a contributing factor to why we have
wildfi res, droughts, and pandemics —
all these things are connected — and
to understand the importance of all of
these things in our lives.
How has the issue evolved since
you founded CANA? Since I founded
the organization nearly 14 years ago,
there has obviously been a huge shift
in understanding the eff ects of climate
change. We feel it in our everyday lives.
I was able to get language written into
U.S. legislation that for the fi rst time
includes the term “rewinding,” as a
management tool for wild horses on
our public lands. We are beginning to
see the term adopted on a much larger
scale now.
What was the signifi cance of getting
the rewilding language into the
Appropriations Budget Bill? The
significance is that the language is
already written and accessible to be
used and put into eff ect. The hope is
that we can get the right congressional
leaders to want to appropriate funding
for wild horse-led rewilding initiatives
and BLM program adjustments that
will see wild horses treated with the
respect that they deserve as a native
and keystone species, as an integral
part of the natural system in helping
to restore these public grasslands.
Rewilding using wild horses is a legitimate
environmental practice that
can help restore balance to grasslands
by building biodiversity, and of course
that is the key to mitigating carbon
to stop desertifi cation due to climate
breakdown.
Manda Kalimian on her nonprofit’s 16-acre farm
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