Sanctuary and Safe Havens
The Institute of Range and the American Mustang is a non-profit organization founded in 1988 by Dayton O. Hyde, whose mission is to give freedom and a quality of life to America's wild horses. The Institute owns an 11,000 acre sanctuary in the Black Hills of South Dakota. On this range, looking much as it did centuries ago, several hundred wild horses run free. Here at the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary visitors from all over the world can come to see and photograph wild horses in large herds, under spectacular conditions. It is a home they share with coyotes, cougar, mule deer, elk, wild turkeys, and peregrine falcons. A home where wild mustangs not only live but flourish, nurtured by their freedom.
In South Dakota Dayton Hyde is working hard to bring the horse spirit back to the great plains. This is his wild horse sanctuary where tourists from all over the world come in search of the mythical West.
Dayton Hyde grew up on a ranch in Oregon and that's where he fell in love with the American mustang.
"I remember trying to see wild horses and I spent about four hours creeping up on a tableland thinking the wind is right I'll be able to look up and see wild horses grazing."
"When I finally stuck my head up over the rimrock the wild horses were there but they were already running. They were already half a mile away and you could hear their hooves running across the lava -- broken lava fields. And it sounded like bells. I've never forgotten that sound of wild horses running. A thunder that you just couldn't duplicate."
"When I look back at the best horses we ever had on our cattle outfit the best ones were captured horses. They acquire a wisdom running out - running wild and free and jumping over rocks, eluding danger grubbing out a living in the midst of blizzards. There's a wonderful wisdom that comes to those horses that is not present in domestic horses. It's simply not there," Dayton Hyde said.
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