UNBRIDLED: Activist trusts wild horses more than men
UNBRIDLED: The life, losses and lessons of horse-activist Laura Leigh. A proposal for a book never written.
Wild horse activist Laura Leigh has kissed just seven men. Four of them have tried to kill her.
She’s been shot, stabbed, raped and run over. The scars on her stomach are a tragic roadmap, the tracks of pain left by male predators.
A Facebook stalker threatened to kill her, then held up in a desert dump called the Clown Motel to monitor her movements.
She’s been bullied by badge-wearing locals and their redneck cronies, trailed on lonely Western back roads by burly Bubbas in pickup trucks, wearing sweat-stained cowboy hats, armed with loaded guns and flinty glares.
She tells them all to go fuck themselves.
They’re dirt bags who would beat down a woman, grade-school educated ranchers who threaten the wild mustangs she fears will one day vanish from the Western range.
She drives a “dick truck,” a towering pickup with a jacked-up chassis, as a not-so-subtle message to hired hands and rough-hewn cattlemen:
“My truck’s bigger than yours.”
Meanwhile, she’s always on guard against the loner who might take out his anger on a woman who speaks out.
Leigh has a personal relationship with her high-desert haunts; they're places she goes to hide. She loves the western desert for its expansive, unpeopled beauty, but there’s a more practical view.
Out here, she says, “you can see shit coming.”
Laura Leigh’s life is “Erin Brockovich” meets “Kill Bill.”
With her red hair and tattered denim jacket, she’s a maverick, an outlier from New Jersey with a streetwise Bruce-Springsteen accent that surfaces whenever she gets anxious and angry, or tries to drive home the sheer absurdity of her life.
She spits the word fuck like a teenage tic, as she eases her way across western deserts and sandstone mountains, staking her personal claim in a hostile world of macho cowboys and old-money entitlement.
In 2006, Leigh fled Washington State to escape an abusive husband; the last of a long line of men who had damaged her body and mind.
She went to a neighbor and traded three goats for an old pickup truck. With Elvis her beloved Bernese shepherd riding shotgun, Laura Leigh drove south toward a new life in rough-and-tumble rural Nevada.
In the desert, she found creatures that have also suffered at the hands of men.
Wild mustangs, the divinely-built horses threatened by what she calls a policy of extermination by wealthy ranchers and compliant government officials.
Since then, she has championed these free-running beasts that embody the unbroken spirit of the American West.
Leigh is complicated, a collection of contradictions.
Whipsaw smart, stubborn and brutally honest, she has long done private battle with herself; an abuse survivor trying to make her way in a man’s world.
For years, she buried her emotions and “let go of her soft side,” as a protection against willful men.
In 2012, she faced the fight of her life: an exhausting bout with breast cancer, during which she ran between her hospital bed and the open range to check on the horses.
In the end, the battle showed her the way to personal salvation.
That means realizing her self-worth, accepting who she is, knowing how to be tough and feminine.
She can wear lipstick.
It’s OK to be damaged because she now appreciates the precious life she has built, the violence she has survived.
She can cry.
For Laura Leigh, saving her sense of self meant nurturing horses.
There’s Chestnut, Leigh’s first-ever horse in New Jersey, a gentle Cleveland Bay in whose presence she always felt secure.
There’s Bell, a Clydesdale one step from the slaughterhouse that eventually became the inspiration for the children’s book Annabelle and the Pink Slippers, written by Leigh’s son, Elrick, and animated by the activist herself.
There’s Passion, a salvage horse with a deadly kick that remarkably picked up a brush with its teeth to create a painting Leigh sold to earn the money to save another 17 horses.
There’s Big Red, a dominant stallion with a sick sense of humor and Sarge, which Leigh returned to the range and was later hunted by revenge-seeking ranchers.
There’s Silver King, an eerily-beautiful animal with a white coat and white eyes; and the little horse Leigh calls Hope Springs Eternal – a foal whose feet were worn off during a round, one a BLM ranger looked at and said “The baby horse has an ouchy feel.”
And there’s Kiva, the former Girl Scout camp mascot that Leigh couldn’t save.
She offered a kill buyer $1,000 for the animal but he refused, saying he needed the horse to make his weight.
Leigh will never forget that wise and sensitive creature.
But battles remain.
The wild mustangs are still perceived by many as an obstacle to grazing cattle and agri-business profits.
Hundreds at a time, they’re driven from their ancestral grazing lands by hard-driving federal government roundups where helicopters hover like angry hornets to harass and chase family bands, separating mother from offspring, bumping the wild-eyed creatures as they stampede across the uneven high-desert landscape.
Their prey includes petrified colts barely old enough to walk, let alone run, as the horses are driven into makeshift corrals for transport to Midwestern stables and sometimes spirited illegally to slaughterhouses in Mexico.
Laura Leigh has driven a million miles behind the wheel of her truck – twice to the moon and back – to personally monitor thousands of days of roundups by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
Often rising at 3 a.m., enduring 15-hour days, she trails the round-up gangs to isolated terrain miles from the nearest road. She has captured heartbreaking images of horses being injured and killed as they flee the predatory choppers.
Once in the narrow holding pens, the animals fight not to be separated. The smallest are often trampled to death; the survivors left bashed and battered.
One mare recently lost an eye.
Laura Leigh writes about all the atrocities she sees on her website. Today, despite her efforts, more wild mustangs are in captivity (40,000) than remain on the range.
But through a series of lawsuits, backed by her evidentiary photos, Leigh has moved judges to exert new restrictions on the federal Bureau of Land Management.
Her litigation has also brought into the public eye conditions on the frequent roundups and wild-horse holding centers; so taxpayers can see for themselves the dangers faced by these intelligent, unharnessed American icons.
Still, alone on the road, safety and sustenance prey on her mind. Leigh keeps her Glock-9 handgun always at arm’s reach, duck-taped to the bottom of the driver’s seat.
She sleeps in low-rent motels and for five straight years lived in the cab of her pickup truck; enduring summer heat and sub-zero winter temperatures where the ice formed each night inside her windshield.
Until Elvis’s death in 2013, she hugged the big dog against a bitter cold that one night cracked the lens of her glasses.
She exists below the poverty line, surviving on donations to her website, living on gas-station coffee, cigarettes, micro-waved ramen noodles and, sometimes, by pouring packets of restaurant ketchup into a cup of hot water.
Her struggles come 65 years after that of Velma Johnston, another activist pioneer who became known as “Wild Horse Annie” for her crusade on behalf of wild horses. In 1950, Johnston spotted a horse trailer leaking blood just outside Reno.
She soon discovered a truckload of terrified wild horses, among many that had been systematically taken from the range; their meat prized as an ingredient in dog food.
Johnston eventually testified before Congress, galvanizing public opinion against such cruel capture tactics as throwing rubber-tire anchors around the necks of galloping horses to bring them down.
Unbridled will track both women’s efforts and obstacles, showing how little has changed in the nation’s treatment of its wild horses.
But these two could not be more different.
Johnston was a shy ranch wife who faced death threats with her husband by her side, his shotgun cocked and loaded. Leigh is no ranch wife; she’s nobody’s spouse.
She’s a brassy product of the city; her “drive-by mouth” rarely held back in public meetings with resistant public officials and hostile ranchers. And Leigh brings both the victories and defeats of her battle to a new online generation.
The book will trace Leigh’s troubled relations with men; including own father; a gritty New Jersey cop who wasn’t happy until he had a son, not a daughter, no matter how hard Leigh tried to please him.
Later, on the rough streets of urban New Jersey, Leigh sought to mirror her father’s image: a tough-girl who brooked no bullshit, who faced the world with the unbreakable cojones of a real man.
She became a professional weightlifter and briefly ran illegal guns for underground crimes gangs. To make money, she once sat for a photo spread she hoped would appear in Penthouse magazine.
She later gave birth to a son and daughter, eventually fleeing the man she knew would eventually end her life, to the wilds of the rural American West.
The book will also take readers through the remarkable turn of events that both upended Leigh’s life and brought her personal clarity; that day in 2012, while far out in the desert, when she hurried to a roadside spot with cell phone reception to listen to her doctor’s voicemail.
Tests determined Leigh had breast cancer.
An epileptic, she had survived a head-on truck crash following a seizure, as well as abuse among men.
But nothing compared to this. Leigh underwent months of radiation therapy, staying in bed just long enough to regain enough strength to return to the range and her horses.
Leigh’s cancer is now in remission. She still smokes, pulling off the road to light up one of the American Spirit cigarettes she buys cheap off the Rez. She’s still ready for the revenge attack she figures will come when she’s alone, at her most vulnerable.
Sitting out on the central Nevada range, she watches a band of horses more uneasily across the landscape. They’ve sensed her presence. “They’re nervous,” she says, exhaling a flood of cigarette smoke. “People … They give me hives, too.”
Perhaps that’s why Laura Leigh will trust a wild horse before she will any man.