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Taming A Wild Horse

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By GEOFF FOX, The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 9, 2007

CRYSTAL SPRINGS - Three weeks after Brenda Webb brought the wild mustang home, she got close enough to touch him.

Almost three months after Webb drove the 3-year-old horse home from Oklahoma, she was able to ride him.

This month, Webb and the horse she calls Captain Jack will head to the Will Rogers Equestrian Center in Fort Worth, Texas, for the first-ever Extreme Mustang Makeover, a competition sponsored by the Mustang Heritage Foundation and the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Webb said she named the horse after Johnny Depp's character in 'Pirates of the Caribbean.'

'He was sort of a guy who didn't trust people and you had to earn his trust,' she said. 'That's sort of how the horse was. But now that he knows I'm not going to hurt him or eat him, he seems to trust me.'

An administrative assistant at Heritage Ford in Wesley Chapel, Webb is one of 100 competitors in the Sept. 22 event for which 220 trainers applied. The best trainers will share $25,000 in prizes, with the winner getting $10,000.

Competition Is On TV

The competition also will be chronicled on RFD Television's 'Wide World of Horses' program. Information on the show can be found at www.rfdtv.com.

Horses will be judged on conditioning, groundwork and a 'Horse Course' that requires maneuvers and includes obstacles found in trail and recreational riding situations, a news release states.

The public will have opportunities to purchase the horses Sept. 23. Trainers will receive a portion of the proceeds if their horses sell for $200 or more. Trainers also will be reimbursed $500 for gas, feed and other expenses.

Sally Spencer, a supervisory marketing specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, said she expects all of the horses to be adopted.

Since 1973, the bureau has placed more than 216,000 horses and burros into private care through adoption, the agency said. The bureau manages 258 million acres of public land, mostly in the western United States.

Although heavy rains have somewhat inhibited Webb's training efforts, she said she is pleased with Captain Jack's progress.

'He's never offered to kick or bite at me. If he's kicked out, it's maybe because I touched his leg with the rope; these are just natural instincts. He's a pretty cool horse. I'm going to hate to have to give him up at the adoption.'

At the Mustang Heritage Foundation, Executive Director Patti Colbert said one inspiration for the competition was to showcase the wild horses' trainability.

'If they are placed in the hands of individuals with the right skills and facilities, these horses can be trained to be highly competitive in the right situations,' she said. 'They're very versatile. I think this competition will show that. People want to show that they can shoot off them or jump obstacles and do all the maneuvers that high-end competition horses do.'

While wild mustangs aren't an endangered species, she said 'herd management numbers' are hard to maintain in areas where public land is threatened by fire, urbanization, drought and other issues. She said there are about 30,000 mustangs in the wild and about as many in Bureau of Land Management facilities.

'The public perception is that the government is gathering and slaughtering these horses, and that's not happening at all,' Colbert said. 'The Bureau of Land Management is making every effort to find homes for these animals. If they're deemed unadoptable, they get moved into long-term holding facilities.'

Spencer characterized the facilities as 'huge pastures, 20 to 30 acres, where they can just run around and be horses.'

Extensive Experience

At 54, Webb said she wanted to see if she still had what it takes to train a wild mustang, which she did years ago in Colorado. She said she has been riding and working with horses since she was about 12.

'They're not really temperamental or hard to train,' she said of wild mustangs. 'They've just never been handled. A horse is a prey animal and with mustangs, if there's anything they don't understand, it's a flight situation.

'They don't trust anything or anybody, but once you earn their trust they become a very loyal animal.'

Reporter Geoff Fox can be reached at (813) 948-4217 or gfox@tampatrib.com.

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