Filmmaker Ashley Avis made a pretty good modern American West version of the classic children’s novel “Black Beauty” for Disney a couple of years back. One thing she figured out adapting Anna Sewell’s novel is that it’s not really a “children’s book” at all, but a plea against the mistreatment of animals.

And another epiphany, shooting her film in and around mustangs of the West, is that all the years of TV news reports and TV magazine features about the Bureao of Land Management’s hand-in-glove-with-Big-Ranch-owners “management” of this symbolic animal of the West, hasn’t stopped the cruel “helicopter roundups.”

Over-“managed” herds are being decimated, with the BLM only fretting over the bad PR of the cynical sale of such horses to Mexican slaughterhouses, all to ensure “privileged” (fat cat) political donors secure all the water and public grazing lands of Arizona and Oregon, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming et al for their herds of sheep and cattle.

So Avis made it her mission to further publicize this inhumane treatment of the Spirit of the West, and this wasteful stealing-in-plain-sight, and brought her filmmaker’s eye to the animals she’s dead set on protecting. “Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West” is a blunt documentation of the “incompetent” and “conspiratorial” way the BLM and the under-exposed forces of greed go about this dirty business, hiding it from the public eye. And she accomplishes this via a gorgeous appreciation for the animals themselves.

The most famous herds have recognizable “family” members and a hierarchy, and people, including Avis have named the most familiar horses.

The filmmaker documents uneasy encounters with callous BLM underlings and functionaries, catching them in lies, the junk science the BLM uses to explain itself, all the rationalizing and re-rationalizing done in the name of “reducing” the herds to “protect the eco system,” when it’s the damned cattle and sheep who overgraze, foul water supplies and stress or wipe out native grasses and plants.

There’s a hapless BLM PR person who really should get another line of work, but no higher ups and no complicit members of Congress appear here to defend the way they fund BLM, which is only empowered to “manage” the mustangs, not the Big Donor ranchers and their beef-and-mutton-for-export business empires.

Avis interviews scientists, Native American advocates and assorted activists on this issue, from children on up, and notes how “attention” curbs the BLM’s excesses, but not witnessing their horse-injuring-and-killing roundups and penning up just emboldens this taxpayer-money wasting project and assault on “public” natural resources.

And she points her camera, from afar, at one main villian –– Dave Catoor, a man contracted to run the helicopters roundups carry out this Western “wildness” depleting atrocity and feed the horsemeat processing beast.

Yes, it’s a lopsided film. No, the Native arguments that “horses have always been here” and that herds that existed before the last ice age wiped out prehistoric horses in the Americas aren’t backed up by science (“Yet,” Avis suggests).

But there have been decades of reporting on this ill-advised and inhumane waste of a public resource, debunking the BS “overgrazing/starvation of the herds” spin the government and the political lackeys and Big Ranchers have shoveled out there. The junk science and obvious corruption of this has just grown more stark, the outrage more pronounced as bought-and-paid-for politicians and look-the-other-way bureaucrats refuse to honor existing laws or to change BLM practices and fire leaders who resist that.

Avis, who uses “feelings” and equine “family” and “freedom” a lot more than the handful of ranchers she talks to here would have, has made a film renewing this wild mustangs debate, one that uses striking images of beauty and “The Cove” expose style documentation of the cruelty and waste to pound home the point.

We’ve known about this forever. And the fact that nothing’s being done about it boils down to a handful of folks who need to be thwarted from committing these unjust and wasteful actions in our name, mismanaging our land and killing off a symbolic resource just because a few privileged old men want two more dimes to rub together in the pockets of their designer jeans.

Rating: unrated, some disturbing images

Credits: Directed and narrated by Ashley Avis. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:39