Wild horses couldn’t stop this love affair
Staff writer
A mustang, the American icon of thundering independence, might not be your first thought of a taming influence on a farm.
But Nathan Graber, who roped his first drafthorse at age 5 and says they “have a way of looking into your soul,” begs to differ.
Last spring, he and his 14-year-old son, Pete, adopted Ray, Silver, Charlene, and Charlie — distinctively shiny, powerful creatures — from the Bureau of Land Management wild horse and burro program.
The plan has been to integrate them in conventional — and very unconventional — ways into their Goessel farming and longhorn cattle operation.
Inside a corral with six-foot fences — required by the BLM to prevent wild escapes — father and son quietly sat on an old tractor tire one summer morning letting the skittish mustangs approach them in their own time.
Velvet muzzles explored hands, faces, necks, legs. Horses and humans seemed to bask in even tentative connection.
It’s a given that they want to train the horses for riding and working cattle. But in a twist that Nathan, a retired Newton firefighter paramedic brings from 20 years of watching suicide rates rise dramatically among first responders and farmers, the plan is to use the horses as a “safe place” for those living with post-traumatic stress injury.
”The connection I’ve made in life with horses is just amazing,” Nathan said. “To be able to allow others that opportunity — that’s the goal, that’s the point.”
The horses, even in their wild state, have helped tame troubled visitors’ emotional issues across a corral fence.
The Grabers would be the poster story for a federal program aimed at humanely and ecologically reducing overpopulation of feral horses.
About 80,000 mustangs and wild burros run on federal lands in 10 western states, BLM wild horse and burro specialist Crystal Cowan said.
”We have room for 26,000,” she said. “If left unmanaged, these horses have a horse every single year. And at that rate, it would double the herd size every four years, and triple in six years.
“If we don’t keep them where they can live off our resources,” she said, “then they spread off the land,” crossing highways and onto grazing land of ranchers.
While the Grabers are doing what the BLM’s adoption program intended, and their adoption of the four horses for $25 a each will be under periodic federal monitoring for a year before finalized, the program has been criticized by animal rights activists.
Roundups, by helicopters, are considered traumatizing to the horses. And a New York Times investigation last week found evidence that through legal loopholes, the federally protected horses may be disappearing into a lucrative foreign livestock slaughter pipeline.
Nathan had estimated it could be many months before their mustangs acclimated enough to human contact to be trained, but by summer’s end, two can be ridden.
Trusting relationships with the horses began when Nathan and Pete walked up and down horse pens at Hutchinson Correctional Facility, where up to 400 BLM horses are housed and used for inmate training before adoption.
The two — who in their western wear strike profiles as ramrod straight as their old-fashioned good manners — took their time. They waited between pens for horses willing to connect with them to emerge from the herd.
Back home in southwest Marion County, the four horses they picked were eating from their hands within about two weeks, Nathan said.
Once they “join up” with humans, Pete said, they calm down faster than domestic horses do. The teen spends long stretches in the pen simply sharing space, sitting “three or four hours at a time” among the horses.
If the horses are learning trust, Pete is learning patience. Still, his anticipation showed when he said how “cool” it’ll be to actually ride — not walk — into the pastures for branding, calving, and herding.
“I like roping and hope to one day be able to rope on my horse, too,” he said.
Like his father, Pete said is sensing more than just a working relationship with the horses.
“If I’m having a bad day or, like, I’m mad at something, I can go out [with the horses] and I feel better – like, right away,” he said. “And I can sometimes forget what I was even mad about. These mustangs, they know where you are and they meet you there and they help you build up from that.”
The calming presence of mustangs has been recognized in a growing field of equine therapy programs that pair veterans, first responders, and others with post traumatic injuries in training programs with the horses.
Nathan attributes this growing recognition of the mustang-human bond to the horse’s ability to “see and keep you who you are” in the trust process.
He said he has witnessed an array of emotionally troubled people — from the grieving to a rape victim — “process through their trauma or difficulties by utilizing mustangs.”
Nathan doesn’t expect the family’s mustang pen to replace therapy or counseling, just to give people an informal place to “feel more,” he said, “where you can process and let go” of negative feelings for a time.
This, he said, could involve coaching, spiritual direction, or counseling by trained practitioners willing to come to the corral with those who need help.
He recently invited a young acquaintance carrying “drama in their life” to his farm to find some peace. And it was Silver, the most “standoffish” of his mustangs — suffering her own traumatic odyssey of round up, transport, and delivery into human hands — that chose to walk up to the corral fence and stand close to the stranger.
The quiet, hour-long communion between horse and stranger occupying space together was healing, Nathan said. That was later confirmed when the visitor texted him to say a dark feeling had been shed during that time.
Darin Luthi, manager of the wild horse program at the Hutchinson prison, said this horse-human connection is observable in the skill and patience inmates who’ve mostly never been around horses learn in working with them.
He also cautioned adopters to carefully consider get a mustang that survived in a wild environment without human contact.
“They are not really something you want to start with if you don’t have a little bit of horse experience,” he said.
The BLM allows only four horses to be adopted at a time each year, and Nathan hopes to increase his herd by four more next year.
“If every year, even if all you do is go and adopt four horses and spend that next year working with each one and getting them to where they need to be so that pretty much anybody can do anything with them, the sky is the limit,” he said.
Hutchinson Correctional Facility, which has had a horse gentling and saddle training program for inmates for 25 years, will work with individuals who want to come for a personal look at the herd, as the Grabers did.
BLM will sponsor a two-day wild horse and burro open house Oct. 2 and 3, at the prison.