Tag: Equestrian

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Mustang Story #10! Is her leg broken?!?

Can you guess what kind of Mustang Marissa picked for the 2022 MYWY competition??? If something brown and fiery popped into your head then you would be absolutely correct😅She chose a completely brown (besides a stripe on her face) 4yr old mare that could gallop circles in a 20 by 20 area with ease. 😳 We were in for another wild ride….

Half-way through our 10hr drive home from the BLM, we noticed her entire front leg was swollen from the shoulder down. Was it broken? Extremely Injured? We couldn’t tell…Upon arriving home, we assessed it the best we could but it wasn’t till the next morning when puss started oozing out that we knew it was an abscess🤢

This brown mare was VERY fiery and also …in pain..a bad combination. To get it to heal, we knew we needed to be able to clean it, so Marissa set to work gentling her. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge. She was aggressive and had a nasty habit of charging you. Marissa stayed the course and eventually won this fiery mare’s trust and respect.

Eventually the abscess healed, and Marissa proceeded to start the mare (known as “Freesia”) under-saddle. She was so athletic and trainable, within 3 months jumping 2’6″ with ease and learning to smile! Maybe our next eventing Mustang?!? The thought of keeping her was exciting… but all the Mustangs in this competition were required to be sold at auction. So we tried to not get our hopes up.

After a fantastic weekend at the competition, receiving Reserve Champion under-saddle🤩, the auction began. The price went right up to our limit…then it stopped. We all held our breath as the auctioneer counted down “going once… twice… SOLD”. We were THRILLED!!!!

It is now 3yrs later and Freesia is a family favorite💜 Marissa does everything on this horse! Need a fill-in horse for your Pony Club rating? Freesia was there!

Need a second horse for your Roman riding endeavors? Freesia can do that too!

How about jumping? Freesia LOVES it and can easily clear 1.10 meters.

Maybe a horse your mom can mosey down the trail on? Freesia also is game for that!

We love this fiery brown mare and couldn’t imagine our family without her!

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Mustang Story #3: The 8yr old chestnut mare…did I make the right choice?

Year 2020

We were not planning on getting two….

If you read yesterday’s Mustang story then you already know we adopted a Mustang on the BLM Online Wild Horse Corral. At the beginning of the auction I was drawn to a big 8yr old Chestnut mare (I know there are a lot of red flags here …age…color…mare..but I was only 15yrs old and didn’t know any better😅). We were quickly outbid and we moved on to other horses. But a few days later we were contacted saying that the “winner” of the chestnut mare had “passed” (I didn’t know this was possible on an auction) and we had the new WINNING bid. This sent us all into a head spin…could we adopt a second Mustang?!? We desperately tried to think things through using sound judgement but our horse crazy brain overpowered any rational thoughts and we decided that “Of course we would adopt her”!

We brought her home and I was so excited to begin training her! She was everything I wanted! Big, stocky and and had the most beautiful blonde mane😍 It was love at first sight…or so I thought. It wasn’t long before I started to realize my mistake of adopting an older chestnut mare. She was sassy and was NOT interested in being domesticated. She also HATED other horses and bent several of my panels kicking at others.

She also wasn’t too keen on the idea of anyone touching her..For 2 weeks I desperately struggled to touch her with no success. After trying everything my sister and I could think of, we were out of ideas… So in a last attempt we decided to try and rope her. We had never roped anything in our entire life so the likely hood of us actually being able to get it around her neck was 1 in 100… We should have known better. By some crazy chance we caught her on the VERY FIRST throw. We were in complete shock and immediately let go of the rope. With all the loose slack the Mustang got both front legs through the lariat and it cinched around her middle…stuck. We started to panic! The rope was old and it took us two entire hours to finally wiggle the rope loose enough for her to get it off from around her middle. Praise God she walked away without any rope burns and we decided roping her was NOT the best strategy…

Eventually, after many long days I was finally able to touch her for the first time. Progress was slow and I made a lot of mistakes but over the course of the next 2yrs she adjusted to domestic life and I even got her going under-saddle. She slowly turned into a solid citizen and started to enjoy time with humans…even sneaking over for scratches and treats. She now lives with a friend of ours and is loving her life and is now almost TOO friendly as she will push on the fence to get just one more scratch💜

I will always be thankful to this beautiful mare for all the lessons she taught me. I can honestly say training this mare was one of the key milestones to my later successes with Mustangs. Whenever I get frustrated, I try to remember that tough horses make better horsemen.