I write about how animals are treated in the U.S., and I try to keep in mind the advice the editor of my first book gave me years ago. “Don’t make us want to throw the book across the room,” she warned. Because, let’s face it, books about animal welfare can easily wade into disturbing territory. Readers tend to prefer happy endings, and my challenge has been to find them.

That wasn’t too terribly difficult with my first two books—one was about a puppy mill rescue who went on to lead a happy life, and the other about an abused circus elephant who now resides at a sanctuary in Tennessee. But I wasn’t certain a happy ending existed when I began to research the treatment of horses in Hollywood movies. Those early days were filled with gruesome tales of the methods used to force horses to the ground as though they’d been shot, mostly in Westerns. Piano wires were tied to horses’ forelegs, making them cartwheel onto dirt once the wires ran out. Deep, concealed pits were dug on sets that galloping horses would plunge into to simulate a fall. The worst were greased “tilt chutes” placed on the edge of a cliff which horses, their eyes often covered, would be ridden onto, making them slide off into water below. Many, many stunt horses were sacrificed by these practices solely to add a dash of excitement to a “shoot-’em-up.”

As I continued to dig, though, I stumbled onto something surprising. By 1940, Hollywood studios had agreed to stop using tripwires and the like, and a small number of stuntmen began training their horses to fall on cue. Having a horse fall to the ground voluntarily is about the most unnatural thing you can ask of it, yet from the 1940s to the mid-1960s more than two dozen intrepid horses learned to carry out this feat and emerge unharmed. These horses were treated well: they constituted their owners’ livelihoods, after all. Stuntmen dug up soft dirt where a fall was supposed to occur; replaced metal stirrups with rubber ones to cushion the fall; and removed their saddle horns so their horse wouldn’t land on them.

“Let me assure you of one thing,” Martha Crawford Cantarini, one of the rare stuntwomen in Westerns, wrote in her memoir Fall Girl: My Life as a Western Stunt Double. “If ever a horse gets hurt doing this type of fall . . . King Kong would never be strong enough to make him do it again. Once learned, they do it willingly or they will never do it again.”  

I focused on the story of one stuntman in particular, a master daredevil named Charles Roberson who, with his Quarter Horse-mix named Cocaine, went on to double for John Wayne and his horses for thirty years.

Movie audiences watched these Western stunt horses on the silver screen knowing nothing about them. The horses were either doubling for “star” horses or they existed to add daring and dash to a scene. But it’s not too late to give them the recognition they deserve, and that is why I’m so elated Bison Books has just published my book Twisting in Air: The Sensational Rise of a Hollywood Falling Horse.