We’ve done this work a little while now, and one of the most important things we’ve learned over the years of gentling Mustangs is what it’s going to take for them to be successful as they go on to their new homes.
That’s what we want most for the wild ones we meet, care for and work with: To find wonderful homes and keep them, to be happy there and not afraid, to be enjoyable to be around and safe to handle, to make wonderful long-term partners for their adopters and owners.
They need to be what I tend to call “user-friendly” or what my friend Gina Sorrell Kuttrus with For the Love of Aria much more eloquently calls “able to take a joke”. Either way, the point is the same.
A Mustang that, like Elsa here, will fall asleep in your arms on a cold and windy day after being easy to catch and halter, willingly leads anywhere and loads into a trailer, stands quietly for brushing, picking up feet and tying, and can forgive some handler error without coming unglued, has a much better chance at making it than one that’s still snorty and bug-eyed, flinches at touch and pulls away at the slightest misunderstanding.
We’ve learned some of this the hard way for sure. We never did – and still don’t – quit learning though, and that’s the key.
There’s no shame in not knowing, but we owe it to these horses to keep working on ourselves until we get better and figure it out. They didn’t ask to be here or to have people and all their stuff and demands thrown into at them. The least we can do is help them out by getting better ourselves so the wild horses we chose to adopt can hopefully just as happy living in our world as they were living in a band on the range.
We’re so grateful to all of our partners, clients and adopters who have and continue to trust us to gentle Mustangs for them, and who understand that changing a wild horse’s – especially a traumatized one’s, as we’ve been working with many with hard pasts lately – mind about it’s new life with humans takes time.
Elsa is a 6yo, 14.2hh mare from Paisley Desert, OR. She is titled. She’s also pregnant. Elsa would like to find her own human to fall asleep on. Located in Guffey, CO.
Elsa was given a second chance at life when Skydog Sanctuary and American Wild Horse Campaign bought her from a kill buyer and sent her to us at Wild Horse Outreach & Advocacy for gentling and to find her happily-ever-after.
