Garland Farm & Stables

12/12/2024

It’s nice to see well known mustang trainers talk about the importance of prioritizing the horse over competitions. They makes such good point about the timeline we give our domestics, but expect SO much more from our wild mustangs! I’m excited about the competition changes made by the Mustang Heritage Foundation. They are much more in line with creating a successful future for these horses. I won’t be competing in an EMM this year, but just maybe, I’ll throw my hat back in the ring in 2026! We’ll see.🙂

Until then- remember your “Why” when it comes to your mustangs and keep putting them first. 🫶🏼Their mental health is just as important as their physical health.

We Just Can’t Do It Anymore😔

~The evolution of wild mustang competitions~

A hundred wild mustangs in a 100 days with 100 trainers.

It was a brilliant idea🧐. Innovative, creative, exciting and challenging. Plus, the added bonus of showing the world just how trainable and amazing the American Mustang is.
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And it was amazing. It worked great for about the first 10 or so years. See back in the beginning you were a huge success if you got your horse around the courses. They were not too complicated. You could win your freestyle if you carried a tarp around and taught them to lay down.

Then the trainers got better.

The competitions got harder 😳and what we expected of the horses got to be monumental. In order to stay competitive you had to work your horse every.single.day. A lot of top trainers worked their horses all day. I know of some who didn’t take outside horses when they did the makeover so they could just concentrate on that one makeover horse.

🏆Winning was everything and we lost sight of the goal.

Horses were auctioned off who were dangerous but promised to be “solid, broke horse for anyone”. Some ended up in kill pens, some went from home to home to home. We lost sight of the why. The why we are doing this in the first place.

When horses are trained to win at a freestyle, many essential pieces are missing for a good transition to domestic life and a new home. They still need those holes filled.

A lot of wonderful trainers 🤠did all they could to encourage buyers to keep the horse in training and give them more time before taking them home. Many tried buying their horse back to keep training and have a say in placing them in the right home. This can be quite costly and let’s face it, mustang trainers aren’t exactly bringing in tons of money 💰training mustangs.

Good trainers got burnt out🥵. Good trainers heart’s 💔couldn’t take the grind and what was necessary to be competitive. Made no sense to put all that money into getting to the show if you couldn’t at least be competitive. Most do not have the bank accounts to be purely philanthropic yet got shamed by the public to simply want to survive financially.

A change was needed.

🥳A change is here.

The powers that be have taken notice. The new competitions offer more time ⏱. One of the reasons I have always loved the Magic. It gave 120 days rather than just 100 and those extra 20 days were huge.

But it still isn’t enough for most mustangs.

That is only enough time for a select few who can handle the stress of rapid training. Most mustangs are not like that and even then you are asking too much. They are generous and forgiving creatures, but it is too much 😞.

We are headed to the time of the majority of the competitions offering from 6mths to almost a year. This is incredible 🤩and the essential evolution of the mustang competition. It is more in-line with the rest of the equestrian show world as well. Check out what Mustang Heritage Foundation and Mustang Champions are doing breaking new ground and making huge changes.

These competitions are also allowing trainers the option to select the homes the mustangs they train go to. This helps the trainer as well as gives the mustang the best possible chance to not change homes or end up at a kill pen somewhere. That level of training, time invested, money invested and control of the person who knows the horse best (the trainer) helps push everything towards the best possible outcome for the horse.🐴

There is this domestic horse formula meme floating around FB right now:
📍Takes 1 year to get them broke
📍Takes 2 years to train one to a discipline
📍3-5yrs to season one
📍10yrs to truly finish one

Expecting wild mustangs to rise to a different time line is unfair and breeds for some rather unsavory 😬practices to result.
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We feel it takes 1-2yrs to get them even domesticated, then they can truly START on the timeline above. Sometimes they can do it concurrently.

We expect too much of them and then throw them away 🗑when they don’t meet that accredited timeline.

They deserve better from us. Let's treat them at least the same as we do domestic horses.

Give them time.

I recently pulled Sandia from the Mustang Magic - Ft Worth 2025 competition. She is a lovely mare but was not handling the stress of this timeline well. Her last video and why we pulled her from the competition was just posted to our YouTube channel.
Link in the comments.

Edited to add: To all those new to us. Isidro doesn’t do any of our social media. It’s me, the other half of IEH - Amber 🙂 though we do share sentiments and point of views on what’s posted here.

12/08/2024

Let’s see those beauties!!

11/26/2024

Christmas shopping , for your favorite equestrian?! Shop local!

11/21/2024

I love her posts! So so informative.

There are a lot of misconceptions about how R+ and R- work, so I thought I'd clear it up with a simplified step by step comparison of how to get behaviors on cue.

Many people wonder if R- has to be aversive, even if its trained gently?

If trained with someone who understands the steps of R-, that the release reinforces the behavior, and to use only mild escalation, often horses can learn a great deal with relatively gentle aversives. We apply a gentle aversive, maintain or slowly increase it, the horse does what we want and we provide a release to let them know they got it. This can be done kindly, with great tact and consideration to the horse's feelings.

Until...

Until the horse doesn't want to do what we're asking, until the task is hard to perform, scary, uncomfortable, inconvenient or unclear. Then our aversive needs to be stronger to outweigh these things. Sometimes we need to use very strong aversives a few times to let the horse know that these small aversives we are using are kind warnings that something larger will come if they don't respond as desired... the history of strong aversives maintain the strength of the gentle aversives.

With R+ we shape the behavior with whatever shaping method we like, free shaping, using targets, capturing and so on, we can be hands on or on the other side of a fence, we don't even need to be near the horse to train them, then as the horse approaches the goal behavior they are reinforced by something they like/want. We repeat this process until the behavior is how we like then we put it on any cue we like, verbal, visual, situational, or non-aversive tactile cues.

Until they don't want to...

Then we counter condition what's scaring them, build their confidence in what they find difficult, break down the skill into small achievable steps, build reinforcement history on the behavior, and ESCALATE THE APPETITIVE! Just like we escalated the aversive we can escalate the appetitive. The history of high value appetitives can work the same way the history of high value aversives worked with R-.

Its all the same, except opposite. Training from opposite emotional directions, seeking vs. avoiding.

11/10/2024

🐰🐹🐥🦆🐓🐑🐐🐴🦄🎊🎉🎊🎉🎊🎉

11/05/2024

Who’s looking for their next partner!?

10/31/2024

A great way to keep frustration out of your rides or training sessions with your horses 🫶🏼

10/31/2024

Clients and students have heard me say all of this ☺️……. When I was younger, we didn’t give our horse “excuses”. I wasn’t taught to step back and figure out the root cause of the behavior…..

But I do now, and it’s made a huge impact on how I ride, train, teach over the last several years. . I’m seeing it make huge impacts on my clients and their horses. Horses have feelings and emotions about what we are asking of them. And their response will always be “because they are a horse, acting like a horse”. It’s our job to continue to learn how to do better, so we can be better for our horses 🐴 🫶🏼

10/22/2024

Holding The Reins....

The question often comes up about how a rider should hold the reins while riding. Tight or loose, one hand or two, what to do with the rein tails, hand and finger placement and on it goes.

If the rider navigates with a very short rein with constant pressure on the horses mouth, that rider tends to get tuned out. And both get tired, maybe even burned out.

Now I ask you, how do you hold the reins on life. Have you shortened up, constantly pulling so tight on the reins that both you and the horse are worn out. Have you spent the majority of your time convinced that you have to pull back in an attempt to keep something bad from happening.

Now remember, this is likely all out of good intentions. However, sometimes in life, a good intention doesn't always produce a good result.

In order for something to change in life, we have to change something. Continue to do the same thing and we will continue get what we have always gotten.

I have learned that when riding and in life to put my hand down, loosen the reins and ride the next stride. Instead of worrying about what might happen, that I can't control anyway. When on a ride, when the boogy man jumps out, I will adjust my reins and stear and guide the horse towards peace and then go back to a lose rein.

Peace and calm can be experienced, usually when we make the determination to look at life from a different perspective and put our hand down.

Pc Tracey Buyce Photography

10/14/2024

Inside or out, we can be there!

10/08/2024

The difficult horses always teach you the most

I hope that all equestrians will find themselves so lucky one day to discover the truly difficult horse.

The horse who demands such fair and respectful treatment that their refusal to put up with unfairness initially takes you aback, leaving you unsure of how to respond to them in training. Leaving you questioning everything you knew.

The horse who forces you to reflect on your training toolbox and to consider why resorting to physical punishment as a go to for unwanted behaviour may not be the best method of problem solving.

The horse who, ultimately, results in such a systemic change in you as a horse person that every horse you touch afterwards is better for it.

Sometimes, we just need a truly difficult horse to force us to reflect on our areas of weakness and reawaken why we got into horses in the first place.

This type of horse is one who refuses to give in to unfair treatment. They will demand from you kindness, fair work hours, transparency and respect. They want to know what is in it for them. Such demands can be exceedingly uncomfortable initially.

Many horse people may react to these types of horses with anger and choose to blame the horse for being too naughty, too stupid or too disrespectful. Doing so is taking the easy way out and lacks accountability.

For those who are ready to commit to self betterment, though, they will respond to these horses with curiosity and start to look inward and adapt to reach this horse and help them succeed. Even if they aren’t able to have this response initially, they will eventually get there.

And thus begins the journey that will change your perception of horses as you know it. It will help you adapt your training in a way that allows for you to work with all types of horses. You will learn important deescalation tactics and realize that explosive stress responses are often created from human intervention, not the fault of the horse.

These horses teach us traits that make us better people as a whole and they are ones that we will always remember and hold dear, no matter how much grief and frustration they initially may cause us.

I am so incredibly thankful for these horses. For without their demands, without their strength of spirit; I would likely have continued to enable myself in lacking flexibility in training, in engaging in lazy training methods that come at the expense of the horse.

Their strong wills and clear communication were the catalyst to a necessary change within.

So, thank you to the difficult horses. The horses who demand more from us and don’t succumb to poor treatment, even if it initially results in unfair treatment to them. They keep on demanding, they keep on communicating, until they are finally heard.

These are the horses that ignite the change in the very fabric of horsemanship. Even amongst the horse people who initially try to ignore them.

Thank them for their difficulty.