I have not often written up our horse bios in pairs without good reason.  These two need to be together, though.  They came to us together and they left our farm together.

The largest of the two, and the second mustang gelding that we selected, was Outlaw.  He was a big seal brown mustang with a beautiful heavy body on him.  He stood out amongst a lot of the smaller-framed bay horses there.  That gorgeous brown muzzle beneath a black coat was very striking.

The third and final mustang adopted was named The Inheritor, but we called him Tori.  I never had his color tested, but he looked very much like he had a dun gene due to some wild-type striping on his legs.  He didn’t have a dorsal stripe, though, so would have likely been nd1 (wild type) versus D (dun) if he was dun.  He wasn’t roan since he didn’t have the typical white hair roaning scattered throughout his coat, and he also was not sabino, since he didn’t have the proper body markings for that.  He either had to be a palomino (with or without a dun gene) or a very light-colored red dun.

One of the things that inspired me to adopt mustangs was that my better half, Jen, had adopted mustangs decades prior when she had lived in Arizona.  Her stories about taking a completely wild animal and gaining its trust was something that I really wanted to experience for myself…and I needed to do that while I was still somewhat young.

I learned a lot by owning mustangs.  I learned a lot about the psychology of horses in general.  I learned a lot about ways not to be killed and not to be injured by horses.  I learned a lot about their language.  I also learned a lot about the rewards of patience and perseverance.

Introduction 30 was Quiz, and he was the easiest and youngest horse of the three.

Outlaw and Tori were both three-year-olds when we adopted them and brought them home.  Tori had been a wild horse most of his life.  Outlaw had been born in captivity, since his mother was gathered when she was pregnant.  That didn’t mean that Outlaw was any less aggressive nor less flighty than his full wild brothers, though.

When we had adopted the three mustang geldings, we initially had them in a small pasture surrounded by six-foot-tall cast-iron mustang panels.  It quickly became apparent that due to their herd mentality, it would be too dangerous to deal with the three of them as a group of horses.  We purchased more mustang paneling and set up three smaller adjoining paddocks.  That allowed the three of them to be with one another (only separated by bars), but it also afforded their humans some safety without having to approach all three of them as a group of horses.

Outlaw only took a bit longer by several weeks than Quiz for me to put hands on him, to remove his BLM tags, and to have him relatively safe to interact with directly.  While he was the horse that I was initially the most drawn to, he had a somewhat difficult personality.  He was a bit of a lunk body-wise and mentally.  He would learn things and then had to relearn things.  The setbacks were often very significant.  One day after I had him relatively stabilized and trusting mentally, there was a very large horsefly buzzing around him.  Without thinking about it a whole lot, I swatted at the fly to get it to leave Outlaw alone.  I didn’t even come close to physically contacting Outlaw, but he saw that swinging of my arm as a sign of aggression, and it set him back about three weeks in his progress.  He wouldn’t even approach me for a few days.  He was not very bright, but he was more amenable to learning things in a shorter period of time than Tori.  It was a constant back and forth struggle to maintain my relationship with Outlaw, though.

Tori, on the other hand, was the greatest test of my patience that I ever had dealing with horses.  He was smart.  He was wicked smart.  On top of those smarts, though, he had a deep-seated mistrust of humans and a highly reactive, explosive personality.  I have no doubt that if he were still in the wild, he would be the head mustang of his own herd.  He was the boss when the three were together.  What he did, the other two also did.

I was patient, though.  Several times per day for months upon months, I worked with all three of the mustangs.  There were days that I was sick or there were things going on with the family or the weather was so atrocious that working with them was put off, but nearly every day at least twice a day, I was out there with them.

It took me six months to just put hands on Tori.  Six solid months of reassuring and desensitizing before he gave in.  Once I put hands on him, though, it felt like the dam broke.  He went from being completely wild and unstable to being another one of my mustang pets.  The problem, though, was that he was still very crafty, and I was the only person that he would allow to get anywhere near him.  He trusted me, and he trusted me completely, but only me.  If anyone else approached, it was a hard “no” from him, and he’d turn tail and flee.  While it was a little bit flattering that he trusted me, it made it really tough for normal things like vet and farrier visits.

The mustangs also taught us some about people.  There were unfulfilled commitments, broken promises, and, during one exchange, we could have filed a police report for horse theft.  In keeping with one of our guiding principles of “praise in public and criticize in private” I’m not going to go into all the dirty details.  When you criticize in public, just like political mudslinging campaigns, the negativity usually boomerangs back onto you.  Few people like to deal with people if they know that they are opening themselves up to negative exposure, fairly or unfairly.

Humans do disappoint me quite a bit and quite often.  Horses less often.

The mustangs were a chapter in our farm’s history that with the passing of Quiz came to an end.  I’m still on the fence whether I agree with how the BLM treats our wild horses.  Perhaps, capture, neuter, and re-home to some other wild location would be more humane and cost-effective, but that also comes along with another set of challenges.