About Us

After serious consideration, we decided to call ourselves Mustangs Gone (un)Wild, even though my vote was put in for WTF Am I Doing - Horsemanship with a close second for American Legend Mustangs. 

The honest birth of this program began with some poor parenting and bad horsemanship nearly 25 years ago. So, if you don't want to read about any of that, I suggest you click off this page and find something a little more lighthearted to read. 

I was 3 years old when my mom gave me the choice to have either a go-kart or a horse. For some reason, perhaps because I wanted an upgrade to the stick horse I would race up and down the hallways with, I chose a horse, which was a decision that surely shaped the rest of my life. 

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My mother dragged me to a sale barn a few days later to pick out my very own 4-hooved, hay-eating poop machine. Somehow, I remember this day despite being so young, and when I reflect on it, I recall an old man showing my mom and me a handful of  "family and kid-safe" horses that he had available. On his tour, we were introduced to horses of all colors and sizes, from paints and flashy grays to ponies and small draft horses. After walking around a few of these stalls, my mom turned me loose and told me to "just pick one" while conversing with the barn owner. In hindsight, she should have narrowed it down for me because I chose the ugliest, rattiest, most humpty-dumpty-lookin' appaloosa gelding tucked away in a corner stall. I remember hearing her ask me if I was SURE that was the one I wanted. In that way parents do when you know what your kid chose was not the best option, so you try to entice them to take a second look and pick something else. But you have to stand by your word, so you load up that crappy appy and head for home after that kid states that she wants THAT ONE - pointing to him and his whole 6.5 strands of balding mane hair. He was appropriately named Tuffy, and he was my absolute favorite thing on planet Earth from that day onward in my young life.
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Tuffy ended up being a great family horse until he spooked at a rabbit in the field a few months later and I fell off of him into a steaming pile of horse shit and broke my right arm. For nearly 6 months, I had back-to-back doctor visits and even underwent corrective surgery to fix that arm. Upon healing and receiving the all-clear from the doctor, I decided that horses were scary, and I wanted nothing to do with them. My mom saw this, and after watching me ignore Tuffy entirely for a while, she began forcing me to interact with him, from making me lead him to even riding him when I did not want to, which I recall as a harsh and traumatic technique that was filled with tears. Though maybe not the best parenting, it worked, and I became your typical grade school crazy horse girl who runs around neighing and racing around trash cans at recess. 
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Tuffy, however, did not get along with my stepfather. Both were aggressive toward each other, and I recall lots of hitting and kicking from each of them. My mom and stepdad ended up selling Tuffy one day while I was at school a few years later. 

Devastation. Absolute devastation. I saw the horse manure in the driveway when I got home from school, and I knew what had happened during my absence. I didn't bother to go inside; I crawled into a snow fort I had made in the yard and cried until my mother came looking for me. I was heartbroken for days, weeks, maybe months at not even getting to say goodbye. While writing this, I still feel heavy sorrow for that little girl and the loss of her friend. Time healed the hole in my young heart, and I moved on to loving my stepdad's horse, a fire-breathing dragon of a sorrel mare named Gemini. 

Gemini embodied the definition of  "mare-ish" to her core. Did she bite and kick other horses for no reason? Yes. Did she force her herd mates out of the barn in blizzards and thunderstorms? Yes. Did she hate it when other horses played or were happy? Yes. She was mean, she was angry, and she was nasty just because she could be. But I fell in love with her anyway and would consider her my heart-horse. She taught me nearly everything I know about riding and reading "horse language," probably because I needed to read her to survive her wrath. We were too poor for me to join 4-H or do any shows, but I did everything I saw on TV with her, from backyard jumping and dressage to barrels to bareback races. Perhaps our stubborn personalities matched, and we had an unspoken agreement to coexist and tolerate each other. We made a great team. She eventually got diagnosed with heaves, and after a brutal 5-year battle with emergency vet visits, mountains of meds, soaking hay, and nebulizing, she was laid to rest in 2023. 

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​​​While Gemini was sick, I joined the Army, I deployed twice to Afghanistan, I was gone a lot, and my mom cared for her during her final days. After the Army, I moved a few times around the country chasing employment and ended up settling in 2022 in New England, my most recent position being out of an Air Force base near Boston. I bought a property and 32 acres with big aspirations of having horses, and then I learned how atrocious the horse market is in this region... I was looking for a few project horses to train myself as I had done throughout my teenage years, and it wasn't uncommon to see project horses near here going for $3-$4k for a plain animal with mediocre conformation. So I started researching, and that is how I learned about the BLM and the wild mustangs. 
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It just so happens that there is a BLM adoption and sale event that is held every year about 40 minutes away from us. So, I put up the appropriate facility requirements, submitted my application, got approved, and showed up at the adoption event with a rented stock trailer on the rainiest day of the year. I did not bid on the online auction for pickup at that event; I just decided to show up and let whatever was going to happen happen. And it did. I came home with my very first wild Mustang. After we unloaded him into the corral, I had no clue what I was supposed to do next (hence the inspiration for WTF Am I Doing - Horsemanship). I started doing what "felt right," and the rest was history...

 

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Things blossomed from there, and now we are a full-fledged Mustang training facility in North Central Massachusetts. I educated myself on the wild horses of the West and became inspired by all of these horses that just need some time, love, and attention to be taken from feral and dangerous to a heart horse like my Gemini or a first horse like Tuffy to someone's child.

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That's our motivation at Mustang's Gone (un)Wild; we don't want to BREAK the horses or snuff out these mustangs' wild spirits. Instead, we strive to build a partnership through understanding. We want people to look out their windows and see that wild Mustang running free out on the range that is also safe and educated enough for them or their families to enjoy. We dedicate our time and energy to making that partnership possible with the Mustangs because the alternative for them is often holding facilities or the adoption/sale loop. We take pride in helping these mustangs get out of those situations because every horse matters. We don't just "sell" horses here, we open the gate to building a partnership with a living breathing piece of American history.