This freeze brand indicates this horse was a wild mustang.
I mean these horses do not look like your average horse. By just looking at their bone structure, their coloring and their eyes, you can tell this is something wild and a little scary.
These horses spent last winter in the wild and were in a BLM pen up until a few days ago. They are now are getting to know humans in a more humane manner.
“I stood in the middle of a pen with about 150 horses and waited for them to pick me,” is how Kathy Sparling of Windhorse Ranch describes how Juno, Magnolia and Alma ended up at her Sebastopol ranch.
Sparling. whose ranch sits in the hills west of Sebastopol, was kind enough to give me a primer on these horses, who are quickly disappearing from wild spaces. Because of amendments in the Wild Horse and Burro Act, it has become easier to get rid of wild horses and burros as “nuisance species.” Sparling barely contains her anger when she speaks of the power of cattle ranchers over the fate of wild mustangs.
Sparling figures if she can calm the horses, gentle them to human touch and get them trained a little, then perhaps someone who appreciates their beauty and uniqueness will also be up for finishing out the training and adopting them.
Sparling knows she is in a race against time and unfortunately we are all in danger of losing a part of our past.
