Magic, when it comes to Mustangs or anything else, comes after the work, not before or instead of it.
Wild Horse Outreach & Advocacy Ambassador Mustang Rock is a very good boy. He’s also young, he’s seeing a lot of things for the first time still and sometimes he’s so happy to be going somewhere that he’s not all that concerned with how he’s going to get there, especially when it gets steep. He’s not even stumbly, but it’s like riding a blindfolded spider, so we jokingly count his footfall out loud for him and help him balance his body on tricky terrain.
Tay Martin isn’t a naturally fearless rider. She’s also not willing to sit at home and wait until she’s feeling brave. So when I said we should go play in the sand again, she said “Let’s go!”, knowing Rock had never been there before and that she’d be scared for the first 20min of the ride until she found her sea legs again.
15 riding miles later we’d had so many laughs and gallops, Rock was a better horse than when we unloaded him that morning, Lacy was happy, Firefly, the filly I’d been ponying, was a rockstar on her first big outing and we’d told all the “What if?”s to go sit down once again.
Did we prepare for emergencies, breaks, break-downs and broken tack? Yes. But we didn’t stay home just because stuff can go wrong and we had a wonderful time.
Everyone wants “magical” experiences from working with and being around Mustangs. That’s great. We do too. Magic follows effort. It doesn’t precede it.
