From Mild to Wild

Mountaineering Mustangs! Throughout the month of January, we are featuring mustangs and mustang crosses.

Did you know that dressage riders who choose a mustang as their mounts are eligible for special awards through the Adequan®/USDF All-Breeds Awards program, as the American Mustang & Burro Association, Inc. is a participating organization?

After finding herself without a dressage partner, a rider from Region 9 loosely considered the idea of bringing home a mustang, until she went to the corral and made it a reality.

By Cameron Dauterive

I was born into a world of horses. From my earliest memories, horses have been an inseparable part of my life. Before I could even walk, I was given my first pony, and I think I spent more time in the barn than in the house. If I wasn’t on my own pony, I was going for long trail rides with my mother on her old event horse. It wasn’t unusual for me to be rocked to sleep on Giddy’s back while she held onto me – my little pink helmet gently tapping against her chin. 

If I wasn’t on an actual horse, I was always cantering around on my stick horse; cowboy boots clumping through the living room, around the yard, and up and down the grocery aisles. That stick horse did the best tempi changes! By age seven, I was competing in dressage schooling shows, and I had found what I loved. By fourteen, I had earned my USDF Bronze and Silver Medals, followed shortly by my Silver Freestyle Bar. 

The next couple of years brought team bronze for Region 9 at the 2012 North American Youth Championships (formerly the North American Junior and Young Rider Championships – NAJYRC), and two trips to Gladstone, New Jersey, for the US Dressage Festival of Champions, earning sixth (2012) and third (2014) place in the Junior Rider Championships on a quirky Oldenburg I trained myself. As a side project, I trained my mother’s American Paint Horse trail horse all the way up to Fourth Level. He was not built for it and didn’t have huge, expressive gaits, but he taught me that correct basics, geometry, and obedience can take you far. He brought me many 9s and my first 10 in licensed competition, and started me down the path of training non-traditional breeds for dressage.

Enter mustangs.

With the retirement of my top horse and the sudden, tragic loss of my Dutch Warmblood youngster, I decided to look outside the warmblood box for my next project. Quite by chance, I saw that a mustang adoption event was coming to Jackson, Mississippi. I laughingly told my mom that my next project would be a mustang. She thought I was joking – I wasn’t. 

I arrived on the second day of the adoption event, and I had this beautiful dark bay gelding picked out. As I approached the desk with a fistful of paperwork, the person in front of me claimed him, leaving only three horses from which to choose. At that very moment, they were bringing an undersized, scrawny, no-neck, Roman-nosed filly into the ring for a demo… so I took her home and named her Cerys. My mom was aghast at this turn of events.

The first thing I learned about going to an adoption event is bring a halter with you and have the handlers put it on. I was naïve and unprepared, and had done neither. We could not get near her! She was skittish, untrusting, surprisingly strong, and lightning fast with her back feet, a skill I discovered the hard way. It was several weeks before we were able to get the halter on her, and she did not succumb willingly.

The turning point with Cerys is when she became gravely ill with a virus. We had to nurse her through it, and being so ill and weak, she was forced to let us. As she regained her strength through the miracle of modern medicine and tender loving care, she decided that domestic life might not be so bad after all. From then on, she accepted her training and took on new experiences like a pro. The first day I saddled her, I probably could have swung a leg over, but I didn’t want to rush things and overwhelm her. She still needed time to fill out, grow, and develop, both mentally and physically. Starting with a completely blank slate was new to me, too. 

The following year, because I was impressed with how Cerys was coming along, and armed with my new knowledge and lessons learned, I thought I’d try my luck at another adoption event that was close to home. This time, I arrived on the first day with a chestnut gelding picked out. When I took my paperwork to the desk to claim him, I was told my choice was no longer available because they’d realized his legs were crooked. I chose a different chestnut gelding from Antelope Nevada Herd Management Area (HMA), who was taller than Cerys and with better conformation. His name is Falchion; Falx for short.

Falx has been completely different in every respect. He was far more approachable and friendly from the start, but didn’t seem to process his training the way Cerys did. Every day with Falx was like starting anew, and he was so reactive to everything. It was immaterial how many times a task was repeated; overnight, his brain would default to factory settings. 

Working a full-time job on top of training my other horses, I realized I needed additional help with Falx, since I could not devote the time necessary for his particular learning trajectory. My friend Justin was recruited to assist, and he worked wonders on gaining Falx’s focus and tuning out the distractions. It became clear early on that classical dressage was not going to be in the cards for Falx. He loves to jump, and is brave and careful on cross country, so horse trials will likely be his strength.

Cerys is now showing Fourth Level dressage and is schooling FEI movements. Will she get to Grand Prix? Only time will tell, but if she does, I will derive immense satisfaction from it. Even my mother says that I am never allowed to sell her. Falx is schooling First and Second Level dressage, while competing at Starter and schooling Beginner Novice. 

Working with two such diverse individuals has taught me a lot about humility and patience. Gaining the confidence of these two horses, who had no reason whatsoever to trust humans, has been hugely rewarding. I always keep that in the back of my mind while I work with them, and it has been helpful in unlocking their potential. Knowing that they have experienced ‘real life’ out on the range has made me ‘tougher’ on my horses raised by humans from day one. I’ll scold them by saying, “Cerys and Falx lived in the wild, dealing with real issues. Why are you throwing a fit because a bag flapped?”

Now, having owned mustangs for almost five years, it has also taught me a lot about just how hardy and resilient these horses are. Living in some harsh and challenging environments, natural selection has favored horses with robust hooves and strong teeth, and these two are no exception. This was a definite plus for me when I was considering a non-traditional breed. Both Cerys and Falx have excellent feet, and neither has required shoes or any dental work as of yet. Since they have evolved to make the most of their available forage, I have found them to be very easy keepers, so the feed bill also stays modest.

If you are considering one of these beautiful creatures as your next dressage partner, take the leap, but take your time. Each horse is different and moves at its own pace. If you can spend hours every day working with them, great, but that is not always what they need. If I can do what I did while employed full-time at my day job, and work several other horses alongside them, then anyone can. But please do not hold yourself to any “standards” or “timeframes” you may see on social media. It is cool that some people can sit on their mustang after three days, but yours may take three months. They are not all the same. But once you create that bond and partnership, it is the most rewarding feeling.