I have borrowed (stolen) the term "FOREVER FREE" from two television film documentaries, CLOUD: Wild Stallion of the Rockies and The Legacy of CLOUD: The Wild Stallion Returns, about a wild horse herd in Montana.  It was produced for PBS by filmmaker Ginger Kathrens, a fellow "eco-terrorist" and wild horse preservation advocate, who publishes The Cloud Foundation website at www.thecloudfoundation.org/ .  Ironically, an apparently accelerated rate of government intrusion into the actual freedom of these same horses, in 2005 and 2006, has seemed destined to turn them into a overly mismanged, money making tourist attraction, with a reduced herd number that likely will destroy the horses' genetic viability.  And, the programs may become little more than a sad potrayal and reminder of the priceless and irreplaceable value of what MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 

Those two words, forever free, describe the essence and embodiment of what the wild horse preservation movement SHOULD BE all about.  Unless this movement aims to preserve the FREEDOM of wild horses, nothing else about "preserving" them makes any common sense.  And we all know what freedom means, in a number of very specific ways.  For us humans, it means that we are free to do such things as pretty much go wherever we want on either our own or public properties, pick and choose who we want to have as friends and companions, while avoiding contact with those we don't want to be around, tell some people that we flat out don't want to be touched or bothered by them and make our own decisions about what is best for us and how we wish to spend our lives.  In America, we like to think that we are allowed to exercise all such freedoms, so long as we don't intrude on the freedoms of others, in the process.

Basically the same standards should apply to wild horses, especially since they so frequently and widely have been acclaimed, albeit immortalized as "symbols of American freedom".  But, immortal they are not.  And, in order to survive, they desperately need to be left alone to roam freely on adequately sized areas of publicly owned wilderness and range lands, in keeping with the supposed intention the 1971 law to preserve wild horses and burros.  They desperately need the freedom to pick and choose their family members and other company, as well as basically choose where they want to or need to roam.  (The very nature of their being wild would pretty much exclude them choosing your front lawn, schoolyard or streets of your town, for their roaming, provided that the leaders of our government would exercise a little compassion and common sense, for a change, to come up with a plan for adequate wilderness accomodations for these horses.  Why won't the politicians even try this, since everything else they have done to these poor horses, so far, has been a cruel and dismal failure?)

"Forever Free" does NOT equate to putting these horses up for adoption into "good homes".  It does NOT connect with giving them to tribes of native American Indians.  It does NOT mean putting them into private sanctuaries or tourist attractions.  And it most surely does not mean having them "managed" by politically corrupted agencies of the U.S. Government, such as the Department of the Interior and its Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Realistically, the continuing future for Amerca's wild horses almost certainly will include lots of the just mentioned adoptions, capture and placement on private sanctuaries, indian reservations and tourist attractions, along with some probably unavoidable interference by government.  But, the primary consideration in all of this should be to re-establish and maintain a substantial base of wild horses who are allowed to roam the wilderness and plains, forever free.  Essentially, it is their freedom, itself, which is the single most important ingredient that has made wild horses so characteristically different and, in terms of physical health and spirit, generally superior to our modern domesticated horses. 

America's wild horses now are proven to be direct descendants of the original members of the species, Equus Caballus, which is known to have evolved here in North America as a wild horse.  But, even though this genetic, scientific point continues to be argued by people who either don't know any better or just want to be deceitful or belligerant, it's a point that is meaningless to the important considerations of preserving these horses.  It always HAS BEEN and STILL is their ability to free roam the wilderness and open range lands that has made and sustained these horses as a kind of special, natural breed, sometimes called the mustang or wild mustang.  Our past experiences with human captivity and management of subsequently weakened breeds of horses like the Arabian and the quarter horse, also descendants of the original Equus Caballus wild horses, should be enough to demonstrate that our taking all of America's mustangs into human captivity will weaken them, likewise, making them less tough, healthy and substantial, physically, and less mentally acute, instinctively, so as to never be able to survive as wild horses again.  It is at such a point that America's wild horses will be forever gone.