Contest pairs horse trainers with wild mustangs

updated 3:09 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2008

DOUGLAS, Wyo. - As a Johnny Cash tune played over the loudspeakers, horse trainer Gary Main Jr. coaxed Victory through a display of discipline and skill inside the Wyoming State Fair arena.

Hundreds of potential horse buyers looked on as Victory stopped on a dime, backed up on command and trotted along the perimeter. On this day, the horses were not from breeders but rather the Western range — separated from their wild origins by only a few months of training.

Faced with a surplus of wild horses, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and its nonprofit partner, the Mustang Heritage Foundation, have been holding a series of training contests and subsequent adoptions like the Mustang Challenge held in Wyoming this summer.

Adoption is likely the best outcome for the horses. The BLM, citing budget constraints and the ever-multiplying herds of mustangs that roam free on federal land in the West, said this summer it was studying ways to get rid of excess horses, including euthanasia.

Effort to boost adoptions
To try to boost the number of adoptions, Patti Colbert, executive director of the mustang foundation, came up with the idea of the horse-training competitions while watching reality TV shows.

"I figured if you could make over a house or a person or a truck, then we could take these mustangs and in a short amount of time show their value because of their trainability," Colbert said.

About 29,500 horses and 3,500 burros roam federal land in 10 states, according to the BLM. That's too many for the agency's rangeland management plans, which also account for other uses like wildlife habitat and livestock grazing.

"The wild horse population doubles about every four years, and the effects of that are they will overgraze the land," said Sally Spencer of the BLM's National Wild Horse and Burro Program. "If left unchecked, they would eat themselves out of house and home."

As potential owners wrestle with increased costs for animal feed and transportation, the government's longstanding adoption program has seen declining numbers, from about 5,700 in 2005 to less than 4,800 in 2007, according to the BLM. The Texas-based Mustang Heritage Foundation is working to change that.

It began holding mustang-training competitions last year, awarding thousands of dollars in prize money and culminating in adoptions at six events.

The group boasts a 100 percent adoption rate for participating horses, amounting to a total of about 850 horses adopted in the last year, in Texas, California, Nevada, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

The horses on display in the Mustang Challenge were rounded up from BLM land in Wyoming, where about 3,600 wild horses live. The 26 participating trainers picked up the horses from a holding facility 90 days before the competition.

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