WHAT LIES AHEAD?
For humans, mustangs the key to co-existence lies in establishing trust
FREMONT, Utah – Indy just needed a mom.
Stripped from the western Utah desert before she was weaned, the little Conger Herd mustang had no time to put up a fight.
Often a captured wild horse needs a long acclimation period and gradual familiarization before it lets a human approach too closely.
Indy didn’t have that luxury. Just weeks old and utterly dependent on her new caregivers, she instantly warmed to West and Kami Taylor’s approaches with the formula bucket.
“She wants her mama,” West Taylor said two days after her capture, patting a haunch to encourage her toward his wife and the bucket. “Who’s the mama?”
Kami West, a self-described city girl from the Salt Lake area, had previously left most
of this horse work to her husband. This time she couldn’t help bonding with Indy, the little dun with a black crescent kick mark on her snout from her trailer ride out of the desert.
The city girl nuzzled the wild horse. “She just likes me to hold her chin,” she said.
“(Indy) didn’t really have any choice but to figure out how to deal with her,” West Taylor said.
More than a dozen people who have worked with or adopted wild horses across the West told The Arizona Republic of these personality traits in nearly identical terms: The mustang is not used to humans and must test one for trustworthiness. Once that trust is established, they say, the wild horse wants to help because it grew up in a social band where individuals relied on each other for safety.
Two days after Indy’s capture, West Taylor was already starting to see it in her.
“There’s no regret or worry of the future,” he said. “She’s just, ‘I am here. What do we do?’
“This is the essence of the wild horse. It’s so trusting and willing to be in this moment.”
Taylor soon learned that the way to establish trust was to be honest and emotionally present.
The horse senses when a human carries a bad day into the corral, or fails to focus fully. That will ruin a session, and the trainer will have to learn to do better, to be a more “valid leader.”
The necessity of blocking out worries or distractions and focusing on relationships helped Taylor learn “who I really am at a spiritual level,” he said.
It also helps to go riding on the Fish Lake National Forest above Taylor’s homestead as he often does, bounding through sage and junipers and quaking aspens, or splashing through the Fremont River.
“This is a place of healing, of reconnecting with self,” he said.
He wished the same fate could find all of the wild horses now living in BLM pens or leased pastures.
“I see 50,000 therapists in a corral that could change 200,000 lives,” he said.
By September, Taylor’s model had evolved, and so had Indy.
Not 21⁄2 months removed from the wild, she now tolerated her stall mate’s departures without a sound, and she readily accepted a rope halter for guided strolls around the farm.
She drew the line at two boards flanking a water hose across the driveway, though. Taylor could not convince her to step across the 2-inch-high barrier, and he didn’t try long. He didn’t want to push.
Taylor now figured the best way to make a go at Wild West Mustang Ranch was to train unruly mustangs for those who had already adopted them. He would still partner with clients who wanted him to pick out wild horses from BLM roundups, but would also invite edgy riders to come break their own mustangs with his help.
At summer’s end, he stood in a riding corral coaching Mary Kaye Knaphus, an Escalante, Utah, country-western singer, atop her nervous black mustang, Lady.
Taylor said she was nervous because her rider showed FEAR of falling: False Event Appearing Real.
Lady would accept a rider but wasn’t eager to trot in circles or hop over logs. She wanted to return to stand on pallets lined out like a bridge, which Knaphus and Taylor had prodded her to do at the last lesson.
Now Taylor asked Knaphus to confidently demand that the horse pay attention to her new demands, instead of what she had wanted before.
“Get her to where she starts asking, ‘What do you want, Mary Kaye?’ ”
Soon Knaphus had her horse trotting over obstacles without slowing, and she was crying at the achievement.
As much as mustangs have moved West Taylor’s heart away from his past as a businessman, his new passion still hinges on a certain horse sense.
He loves the animals, their spirit, what they represent for him and for America. But he also loves the land and its many uses, and sees the horse dilemma in basic supply-and-demand terms.
People used to demand enough adoptable mustangs that the government could humanely pluck thousands from the range in a given year without warehousing them in captivity for decades.
“We’ve got way too much product,” he said, “and what does any good business do when they’ve got way too much product, is they liquidate it and they put it on sale.”
The sale isn’t working as advertised anymore, when only a few thousand people adopt every year.
Even if every American really wanted a mustang, though, most of the captured horses wouldn’t suit them, he said. Most are too old, too wily, too wild.
Taylor routinely travels to helicopter roundups, partly to see if a particular animal stands out to him as a likely student, but also just to take it all in — the echoing choppers, the occasional deaths, the horses on the run.
All of it becomes his story, a sort of unbranded frontier provenance that he can relate to that horse’s eventual buyer.
He also comes to learn, though. He meets the horse advocates, the ranchers and hunters, the land managers caught in an eternal political scrum.
What he has learned so far is that just about nobody is right and nobody is wrong.
Like some of them, he is captured by the wild animal’s spirit.
Like others, he recognizes the ecological damage caused by overpopulation, and “can feel the rancher’s side.”
“They own that grazing right to be there. So does the horse. So does the highway. So does the public.”
Like the government land managers, he reluctantly supports the sometimes heartbreaking helicopter roundups but doesn’t know where the targeted horses can or should spend the rest of their lives.
“Every player in this that’s got a card has a pretty valid hand,” he said. “You know, there’s a point to be made on every side of it. “There’s just not an easy win.” His hope is that researchers succeed in creating a new, longer-lasting birth control.
“We can’t keep making more wild horses,” he said. For now, he’s training Indy. The little filly will likely stay on as a family favorite, and she’ll help acclimate the next trainee driven out of the Wild West and into a new understanding at Wild West Mustang Ranch.
Taylor is learning to “flow with life,” and to help a handful of wild-horses transition to a rewarding life off the range.
“It’s something,” he said. “It’s a start.”