9135 McGaven Peak - "Lexi", My First Mustang Horse

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9135 McGaven Peak - "Lexi", My First Mustang Horse

Kaye Handlon - The journey with my first Mustang, tag number 9135, "Lexi". I'm Kaye Handlon. I started my horsemanship journey when I was 10 years old, in 1980.

I've been an instructor since the mid 1990's, and have owned my own boarding facility since 2001. I adopted my first Mustang horse from the United States Forestry Service in March of 2024. She came from McGavin Peak, and I adopted her from a local program called Mustang Alley. They helped me pick out a horse that would be suitable for a first timer like me. :-) #9135, "Lexi". During the pandem

ic I discovered Warwick Schiller and his "Journey On" podcast. Then I discovered Elsa Sinclair, Leslie Desmond, and Jane Pike. I went to the first "Journey On Summit" in Texas and fell deep into the rabbit hole. ;-)

I plan to get inspiration from Warwick Schiller (of Attuned Horsemanship) , Elsa Sinclair (of Freedom Based Training), Andrea Wady (of Pure Liberty) and what I learned from taking Leslie Desmond's online class to make a connection (some may use the word "tame" or "gentle") with "Lexi". I plan to record on most days, and post my experiments & observations. I want to try to stay under her stress threshold, I don't want to use aversion, equipment (except for the mandatory pen panels) dominance or fear. I also don't want to bribe her with food to make a connection, and I also don't want her to have to make a choice between food and saying "No thank you".

09/06/2024

I took a chance to see if I could get her back into the pasture by "leading her from behind", and not use food.

I still have not caught her and put a halter on her, and I really haven't done much with her since the last few weeks have been as miserable as Satan's armpit. But it looks like the weather is finally going to mellow out a bit, and I'm going to start spending more time with her.

Yesterday was the 10th class in Elsa Sinclair's online course. I think I'm the only one in the class that has a feral horse. The class was about the principles of draw and drive. She talked about preparing to use assertive or dominant leadership (do not confuse her use of the word dominant with people like Clinton Anderson). She asked the class to think about a scenario where you might need to go into dominant leadership to speed things along. I think I was the only one who responded during the live Zoom. My response was, now that the weather will be less severe, I'd like to get moving along on getting Lexie caught so I can get her vaccinated by the end of October.

So there's my next goal🙂

08/26/2024

Being a little unpredictable 😁

08/26/2024

Trying to help out with the horse flies 🪰🌿🌾🤔😁

08/25/2024

Finding creative ways to initiate touch that she doesn't experience as too much pressure.

But she swatted me first. 🤪

08/18/2024

Getting her interested in the halter / rope before I ever intend to use it.

08/18/2024

Just spending time during these miserably hot summer evenings trying to find interesting ways to initiate physical contact. ❤️🐴
She's truly been a gift as a first mustang.

07/30/2024

I have a hard time holding the camera and not being clumsy.

I also have a hard time with wanting to catch the good things on camera so I try to get her to repeat them. I need to get my tripod set up.

But we're getting more comfortable with touch!

Usually I'm not into hand feeding because I think it causes more problems than it solves, but since she still timid about being touched, I'm not so worried about it right now. I have been giving the horses lots of cold carrots because it's been so miserably hot out.

07/19/2024

You guys... Not only did she keep a chilled mind on her first trip out of the pen, but she came back! Easy peasy lemon squeezy! 😭 I won the " your first Mustang" lottery. ❤️🐴🥹

07/18/2024

Today is Lexi's first day loose in the pasture that her pen is in! I don't know what possessed me, but I went out there to clean her pen with the tractor and I opened One of the corral panels looked at me so sad. "Please? I've been so good."

So I walked up next to her and I said, come on. Let's go. And we just walked out together. ❤️🐴

Sooty on the other hand 😱🙄.

Of course, my impulsive timing was not that great. There's a huge storm coming.

07/10/2024

Today's feels like temperature is 105. I thought I'd play with the spray bottle to see if I could give her a little relief. 🙂 This is the first time with the spray bottle.

07/09/2024

After last night's milestone, I took a leap of faith. I removed two corral panels to give her that much space on the electric fence line shared with the ponies. So far so good! If this goes good, I'm going to keep pulling the corral panels off of that shared fence line and, take them to the other side of her area and make her domain bigger. 🙂

07/09/2024

Mile stones! She spent the night with a section of the pipe corral fence panels open to the electric fence where the pony paddock is.

I picked this little section because on the other side is a tree, and I thought if she was going to try to run through or jump over that the tree would make her have a second thoughts. But she has never behaved that way. She's never crashed the fence. She hardly ever moves. As a matter of fact, somebody across the creek from the pasture is cutting down trees and you can hear them crashing through limbs and thudd All right ing on the ground. And she doesn't even care.

I think I'm going to take a chance today, if I can muster up the strength, and pull one of those panels out of there and give her a bigger section of the electric fence.

07/06/2024

Making myself interesting. Cultivating curiosity without crossing over into concern.

07/04/2024

The biggest fly mask ever

06/21/2024

We've been doing the slow work. But, someone graduated to almost normal horse fencing this week!

Took out a section of panels and replaced it with t posts, with a top line of electric tape and two strands of electric wire. Then I recycled the mesh I had on the top of her round pen panels to give her a visual while she learns to stay away from the electric. 💥🐴🙃

06/03/2024

Reviewing week 1 and 2 in Elsa's Freedom Based Training class.

05/29/2024

It was a long day of human doing. Lessons, feedings, hauling grit down to Lexi's pen.

When the sun started to go down I paused to be a human being, and work on The Trust Technique (For Lexi). Sooty, Pixie, Lucky and Lexi enjoyed the zen. Karuma, however... 🤣😺

But in Freedom Based Training (Elsa Sinclair) or Pure Liberty (Andrea Wady) they would say Karuma took the lead and was watching the environment. ❤️🐴😽

05/29/2024

Day 56 - Observation Week (Elsa Sinclair's class Freedom Based Training)

Lexi has reach a milestone today! I'm taking down the mesh that makes the 6ft fence height requirements from the USFS/BLM for adopted Mustangs. She's been with me for 56 days and if she needs to jump the fence then something bad, like the zombie apocalypse, is going down and I hope she makes it!

I was also taking grit down to help with the mud.

When I was done with work she made up a game for us.❤️🐴

05/29/2024

05-27-2024
Observation Week (Elsa Sinclair's class "Freedom Based Training")

I've listened to the first class again while I've been on the tractor battling the war of the grass.

In my observations, I think she's curious, but has the hesitation just because she doesn't have a lot of data about the human world, compared to a horse that was born in domestication.

Since I can't catch or touch my horse, Lexi, I thought of a possible project that might help her with the flies.

She was curious about what I was doing up on the ladder. When she went to investigate her for herself she spooked herself. But I observed that once she got to the end she stopped and rested her hind leg. I've seen domestic horses a lot more skittish than she appears to be. 🙂

05/14/2024

Day 41 - After consulting our agent (😁) I've decided to remove the mesh at the top of her pen since she's not shown any signs of being highly reactive, and I have no intention of pushing her into a panic.

05/11/2024

A little Linda Tellington Jones mouth work? I thought maybe she would yawn. But she didn't.

05/11/2024

Today on "Life Lessons for the Modern Horse", introducing the electric fence 😭❤️🐴

05/10/2024

Party at Lexi's place!

Well, the Universe decided to send me a suggestion. I was listening to one of Elsa Sinclair's "Tea Time" videos on her F...

05/09/2024

Well, the Universe decided to send me a suggestion.

I was listening to one of Elsa Sinclair's "Tea Time" videos on her page, and she was talking about relationships and goal setting. At the end of this talk she mentioned that she was starting a new online class and that there was still one opening left.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/8AKxWaphpyvyRMf7/?mibextid=oFDknk

I had offered an acquaintance of mine to use my Thoroughbred, Lena, last year to take Elsa's online class. She would fill me in on the coursework, and joined Elsa's Patreon group around the same time. However, I was neck deep in Leslie Desmond's coursework (24 weeks) so I didn't really have the bandwidth to follow along with Elsa's work at the same time.

Anyhow, I decided to take the leap and take Elsa's class with Lexi. It'll be 18 weeks online.

And I declared that my goal with this class was to ultimately get Lexi out of the corral and into the pasture.

My sub goals are:

1. To be able to touch her enough that it doesn't cause too much stress. And to eventually...

2. Put a halter on her so I can lead her around the pasture before I turn her loose.

3. But to get those two done, I want to create a dynamic relationship and a language to be able to do things together within the pen without a halter.

I've dipped into Liberty work when I was taking the Straightness Training coursework a few years ago. But that was using horses that were already handled. And that was going through posture work to get to the liberty work.

I want Elsa's freedom-based training (FBT) to be the foundation of Lexi's education. So that any equipment I use with her is fine-tuning, not manhandling.

05/09/2024

Well our 1 month anniversary has quietly come and gone. I'm still just hanging out, investing the time in earning her trust. Trying to find things to trigger her curiosity.

I did start a small / short online course called The Trust Technique (James French). I'm about a third of the way into it And it's just a deeper dive into being with the horse and being mindful yourself. There's a component to it that he calls "mindful regard". The same essence Warwick Schiller would call it "attunement" (that I believe he got from Sarah Schlote, "The sense of being seen, being heard, feeling felt, and getting gotten.").

So... the golden threads that I'm finding in common between different educators and their methods. I'm loving it! ❤️

I've also been feeling the guilt that she has to be in the corral pen in the mud.

I did ask Elsa Sinclair how she got her wildlings adjusted to fencing (she gets her wildlings out of corral panels as soon as possible, from what I gather, before she can even touch them) and if she had any tips to help me get this one adjusted to electric fence so I could get her out of the corral faster. Elsa supported some information I had already found in a few Mustang FB groups.

The information I found at first was to string wire / tape parallel to her corral panel so she learns that a shock comes along with the visual structure of the corral panel. Then Elsa suggested to eventually run the electric tape across her pen dividing it in half letting her learn about it how it would be, visually, in the pasture. So that gave me a lot more confidence to start working on that aspect of her domestication. That will also give me the means to drive the tractor into her pen to make cleaning a lot easier.

05/03/2024

I spent about 4 hours outside with Lexie today.

Gosh for such a young horse I don't see her moving around much. Of course she doesn't have wide open space, and I appreciate she is not zesty. But I just feel bad that her exercise is just basically meandering from one end of the pen to the other.

So I decided to see if she wanted to play a little bit. Regardless of what I set out to do, which was just try to get her to move, I hope she did not interpret it as me chasing her.

We did have a lovely moment. About 15 minutes later hanging out with pixie the Haflinger (The next video to be uploaded).

Address

Starting Point Equestrian, LLC
Pittsboro, NC
27312

Website

http://StartingPointEquestrian.com/

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I took a chance to see if I could get her back into the pasture by "leading her from behind", and not use food. I still have not caught her and put a halter on her, and I really haven't done much with her since the last few weeks have been as miserable as Satan's armpit. But it looks like the weather is finally going to mellow out a bit, and I'm going to start spending more time with her. Yesterday was the 10th class in Elsa Sinclair's online course. I think I'm the only one in the class that has a feral horse. The class was about the principles of draw and drive. She talked about preparing to use assertive or dominant leadership (do not confuse her use of the word dominant with people like Clinton Anderson). She asked the class to think about a scenario where you might need to go into dominant leadership to speed things along. I think I was the only one who responded during the live Zoom. My response was, now that the weather will be less severe, I'd like to get moving along on getting Lexie caught so I can get her vaccinated by the end of October. So there's my next goal🙂

Being a little unpredictable 😁

Finding creative ways to initiate touch that she doesn't experience as too much pressure. But she swatted me first. 🤪

Getting her interested in the halter / rope before I ever intend to use it.

I have a hard time holding the camera and not being clumsy. I also have a hard time with wanting to catch the good things on camera so I try to get her to repeat them. I need to get my tripod set up. But we're getting more comfortable with touch! Usually I'm not into hand feeding because I think it causes more problems than it solves, but since she still timid about being touched, I'm not so worried about it right now. I have been giving the horses lots of cold carrots because it's been so miserably hot out.

You guys... Not only did she keep a chilled mind on her first trip out of the pen, but she came back! Easy peasy lemon squeezy! 😭 I won the " your first Mustang" lottery. ❤️🐴🥹

Today's feels like temperature is 105. I thought I'd play with the spray bottle to see if I could give her a little relief. 🙂 This is the first time with the spray bottle.