Velma Johnston was born in Nevada. She grew up on her parents' ranch, where the ranch horses were treated humanely and trained using gentle methods. At at 11, she contracted polio and was in a body cast for six months. This disfigured her body to some extent. Like many other children who survived polio, Velma had to learn to deal with schoolmates who were cruel to her because she looked different. She concentrated on her studies and working with the animals on the ranch.

At that time, wild horses were chased by airplanes until they dropped from exhaustion. Some were chased by trucks, and when caught, their nostrils were wired shut so they could barely breath, and their necks were roped to tires to slow them down while the truck went on chasing the rest of the herd. Horses were shot and left to suffer and die. Horses, wounded or not, were loaded on trucks and trains with no food or water, packed in so tightly that if one died, it did not fall, but was held up by those squashed in next to it. All were bound for slaughter houses.

Velma wrote, "Although I had heard that airplanes were being used to capture mustangs, like so many of us do when something doesn't touch our lives directly, I pretended it didn't concern me. But one morning in the year 1950, my own apathetic attitude was jarred into acute awareness. What had now touched my life was to reach into the lives of many others as time went on."

One morning as Velma was driving, she noticed blood dripping from the truck in front of her. She followed the truck to a rendering plant. Being careful not to be noticed, as she watched, she saw a yearling that had fallen in the truck, and could not get up; it was stuck between two mature horses. The yearling was being trampled to death by horses packed in too tight to even move. Outraged by this, Velma set out on a crusade to stop such abuse from ever happening again.

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