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"The Horse Lover: A Cowboy's Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs"

Aired on Tuesday, March 18th.

On this edition of ST, we speak by phone with H. Alan Day, who's the younger brother of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and who co-wrote with her the bestselling "Lazy B" memoir of a dozen years ago. Alan Day has a new book out called "The Horse Lover," which he tells us about on today's program. This moving and perceptive autobiography mainly describes how he was able to establish a sanctuary for unadoptable wild horses previously warehoused by the Bureau of Land Management. Mustang Meadows Ranch, as the facility was called, began in the late Eighties; it was the first-ever government-sponsored wild horse sanctuary established in the United States. Yet Day's volume --- which Booklist, in a starred review, has tagged "an instant classic" --- is more than simply a chronicle of the joys, surprises, trials, and frustrations that went into establishing and operating Mustang Meadows. "The Horse Lover" is also, of course, a sincere meditation on humanity's deep connections with animals as well as landscapes --- and with horses especially. As was noted of this book in a review in "True West" magazine: "Day's poignant personal journey is one of both heartache and hope, a mirror of not just one man's desire to save a great American icon of freedom, the wild mustang, but a nation's."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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