Woolly rumps swayed in unison as two stock trailers rumbled into the Ellensburg, Washington, rodeo grounds. The passengers took in their surroundings, ears flicking and nostrils flaring in the 39-degree air. After a full day of bumping over local roads from Bureau of Land Management corrals in Oregon, the mustangs had finally arrived.
Marjie Hicks, 64, watched the horses roll in. She and her husband, Richard, 68, had driven two and a half hours from their home in western Washington to this March 2024 event, which was organized by a nonprofit called Mustang Yearlings Washington Youth. (Despite its name, MYWY is open to adults, both human and equine.) Five years earlier, Hicks trained her first mustang through MYWY. She was hooked by the experience and brimmed with anticipation at training two more.
But as she stood in the cold, bundled in a blue down vest and checkered fleece, Hicks had second thoughts: Could she afford this? What if she got hurt? Was she getting too old for this?
The first trailer backed into a chute walled with metal livestock panels. A half-dozen horses burst into the winter sunlight, their hooves sinking into the earth. One balked. “Ch-ch-ch-ch!” a man called. A lanky buckskin popped out of the trailer and sauntered away.
These horses had never been handled by humans. They darted into pens, frantic at first. But an hour later, as the glow of dusk spread across the sky, two dozen mustangs pushed their noses into piles of fresh hay. Occasional snorts broke the silence.
At 8:30 the next morning, the trainers and their families squeezed into the ticket sales room, snacking on donuts. Marjie and Richard Hicks found seats in the back. An unofficial dress code dominated the largely white and female crowd: boots, jeans, trucker hats. One teen’s sweatshirt read: I can’t go to school my horse needs me.
Susan Clogston, who founded MYWY in 2010, briskly oriented her audience. That day, she said, the trainers would take home mustangs. For five months, they’d care for them and gentle them, meaning they’d accustom them to being handled by humans. “Your greatest asset will be patience,” she advised.
Come August, the trainers would be expected, though not required, to compete in MYWY’s 2024 mustang challenge, a hybrid competition and adoption event where they would demonstrate their horses’ skills in front of potential adopters. “This is all about educating the public and getting these horses home,” Clogston reminded them.
Trainers could secure adopters before the show, place horses in the post-show auction or adopt the mustangs themselves. Ultimately, it was up to them to find the horse a home. Until then, they were responsible for its care, including the expense.
Clogston also announced that MYWY’s 2024 budget would be much tighter. For years, a nonprofit called the Mustang Heritage Foundation funded MYWY and similar programs, backed by millions of dollars from the BLM. But the contract had expired in September 2023, and the BLM decided not to renew it. To compensate, MYWY was raising money, scaling back and moving show venues.
Trainers looked on as BLM wranglers began loading horses into personal trailers. The trainers had ranked their preferences, and MYWY paired the horses with humans on a first-come-first-served basis. One woman, Loriann Warner, was eyeing mustangs in a distant pen when a fight broke out. Screams ripped through the air, followed by the thud of hooves on horseflesh. Warner, a MYWY veteran, winced. “I think that’s my horse,” she murmured.
At 10:30 a.m., Richard backed the Hickses’ trailer into the chute. One graham cracker-colored mustang, #8397, and the walnut-hued #8223 cautiously sniffed it. A wrangler flicked a flag, encouraging them to move. The fillies stepped into the giant metal box, the door slammed and the mustangs headed off to their new home.
TODAY, MORE THAN 83,000 wild horses and burros roam public lands in 10 Western states. No one knows exactly how many more roam tribal reservations, but the Navajo Nation alone estimates that it has 100,000. Horses originally evolved in North America but are believed to have died out on the continent about 10,000 years ago. Today’s mustangs are the descendants of animals that were reintroduced by European settlers — beginning with Spanish colonizers in the 16th century — and subsequently bred and used by Indigenous peoples as well as white settlers. The majority of public-lands herds live within BLM jurisdiction and are federally protected by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which saddled the agency with one of the West’s most bruising controversies.
Wild horses, which some conservationists consider invasive, compete with livestock and native game for limited food and water and sometimes suffer from starvation and dehydration themselves. Their relentless grazing degrades wildlife habitat and damages native plants, paving the way for invasive ones, and they occasionally wander through towns and across roads, causing car accidents. Absent human intervention or the occasional natural predator, herds can double in four years.
In 2024, 73,520 animals roamed BLM land, roughly three times the number the agency says that land can accommodate. The BLM needs to shrink its herds, but it’s prohibited from using federal funds to slaughter horses or euthanize healthy ones, and it has yet to figure out how to administer birth control on a large scale.
So, with few options, it periodically rounds up mustangs, holds them in corrals and attempts to sell or adopt them out. For $125 — an amount unchanged since 1997 — you can acquire an untrained mustang from the BLM. If you’re willing to pay more, you can bring home a gentled or trained animal through programs like MYWY, or from the BLM partner programs in which incarcerated people train wild horses. You can also bid on an animal through the BLM’s internet adoption program: Think eBay for equines.
“It’s always our goal to place as many animals as we can in private homes,” said Paul McGuire, who, when we spoke, was the acting division chief of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro program. “We use every tool available to us.”
Nonetheless, BLM historical data suggests that since 1996, the agency has adopted or sold just 153,000 of the 240,000 horses it has removed from the range. The remaining animals — 66,000 horses altogether, as of September 2024 — were sent permanently to private pastures, owned and operated by BLM-funded contractors. Over the past decade, caring for animals like these has blown through 60% to 70% of the agency’s wild horse program budget, hobbling investment in areas like fertility control research.
One of the most elaborate efforts to increase adoptions began two decades ago. Around 2001, the BLM hired the marketing agency FleishmanHillard to promote and increase adoption numbers. Janet Greenlee, a horse lover who worked in the firm’s Sacramento office, co-led the project. After the firm did extensive research and spent a year promoting adoptions itself, Greenlee says she realized that horse trainers were key to successful adoptions, and that the BLM should hire a third party to find a creative way to market its mustangs to them.
“It’s always our goal to place as many animals as we can in private homes.”
In 2006, the BLM started a partnership with the Mustang Heritage Foundation, which Greenlee had helped build, signing on in 2003 as a volunteer trustee. “I’d gotten bitten by the bug,” she said. “It became a personal interest to see if we could get this to be successful.” A woman named Patti Colbert led the young nonprofit. At the time, Colbert’s favorite TV show was Extreme Home Makeover, in which designers transformed fixer-uppers.To her, the parallel was obvious: In 2007, the Extreme Mustang Makeover was born.
In these buzzy shows, competitors had 100 days to train a raw mustang, then compete with it. Finalists performed flashy freestyle routines complete with music, costumes, props and stunts. Afterward, the mustangs were sold at a public auction.
“Every bit of it was trying to draw attention to the versatility and value of these animals,” said Clinton Shultz, current CEO of the Mustang Heritage Foundation.
Under Colbert, the Mustang Heritage Foundation also created the Trainer Incentive Program, or TIP, which paid select trainers $1,000 for every mustang they gentled and homed. As mustang events garnered attention, TIP “challenges” — competitions similar to makeovers, with somewhat lower and less dramatic expectations — sprang up around the country, in Western states as well as in others like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Georgia. Organizers obtained horses from the BLM and often received funding from the Mustang Heritage Foundation. Many participants were kids or teenagers, while others were horse-loving adults with day jobs. These events were often wildly successful: At one auction in Oregon in 2024, the average price for a trained mustang was more than $5,000, with one horse going for $36,000. But BLM data also suggested that some markets were becoming saturated.
Over 17 years, the BLM paid out more than $41 million to the Mustang Heritage Foundation. Meanwhile, a devoted community of mustang trainers blossomed through groups like MYWY and others in the foundation’s sprawling network. Members of this community sacrificed their time and often their own money to train horses. And they have continued to do so despite recent shake-ups in the training world — not to mention the daunting magnitude of the problem they’re trying to solve.
IN THE MUSTANG WORLD, there is a belief that you haven’t earned the right to name a wild horse until you’ve removed its tag.
A day after returning from Ellensburg in March, Hicks loosened the cord that secured a metal tag under the throat of Mustang #8223. She pulled it free and christened the filly Casino. Mustang #8397, the fine-boned golden dun, would be Roulette. Hicks later explained the names: “It’s always a gamble when you’re working with wild horses.”
She appeared to have gotten lucky this time. But it was a different story in 2020, when she brought home her second MYWY mustang. Every time she grabbed the lead rope, the mare rose up on her hind legs and lashed out with her front. “If you ever had a horse doing that in front of you, it’s like, ‘I could die,’” Hicks recalled. It took her five weeks to remove the mare’s tag. Roulette and Casino, by comparison, were “so stinkin’ easy,” she said.
Hicks grew up in Tacoma, a half-hour north of Roy, Washington, where she lives today. As a toddler, she said “horse” before she said “mama.” By age 5, she had her first pony; at 12, her first “real horse.” In her 20s, after she and Richard married, they settled in Roy, where they built a covered arena and installed fences for pastures on their 5-acre plot.
Despite injuries and unpredictable progress — even the possibility of no progress at all — Hicks felt addicted to training mustangs. “They are smart,” she said. “They learn so much from being in the herd environment, even if it’s only for a year or two.” Each day over the next couple months, she came home from her job as a library technician at a local middle school, started dinner, then headed outside to work with Casino or Roulette, or ride Samba, her first MYWY mustang, which she’d adopted. Dinner often burned.
“It’s the only time I don’t worry about anything else,” Hicks said.
Each week, she added to Casino and Roulette’s curriculum. She taught them to enter the horse trailer on command. She picked up their feet and tapped on them, mimicking a horse-shoer, or farrier. Progress came in fits and starts. When Hicks took them to a clinic to identify the gaps in her process, Casino resisted the new trainer, rearing so high that she toppled over backwards — four times.
“They are smart. They learn so much from being in the herd environment, even if it’s only for a year or two.”
By the time I returned for a third visit in mid-May, Casino and Roulette were used to strangers. Hicks handed me a brush and directed me to Roulette. I began grooming her shoulder, my right hand holding the brush, my left resting on her neck for balance. Hicks pointed out that two months earlier, Roulette would never have tolerated two hands on her; instead, she would have reacted as if I were a predator.
During this visit, Hicks mentioned that she was considering adopting out both mustangs. There was talk of layoffs at her school, and she was worried about her job.
Training mustangs isn’t cheap. In 2024, MYWY trainers received a $200 stipend per horse if they attended the show but were otherwise responsible for the considerable expense of caring for the animals. Hicks estimated that she spent over $100 a month on hay per horse, even after a donation of 20 bales of alfalfa from a local feedstore. Medications, dewormers and nutritional supplements added another $50 per month, and the horses’ hooves required trimming at $60 every six weeks. Then there were vet visits, lessons and clinic fees, as well as all the physical labor: daily feedings, scooping manure and scrubbing slime from water tubs. She estimated that if she figured in her time, training a mustang cost her $1,000 a month.
“You have to be in the right place in your life to be able to afford horses,” Hicks said. She recalled a student who once asked how much it cost to own a horse. Hicks considered the labor, the money, the vacations she couldn’t take. She told the student, “It costs everything.”
LATER THAT DAY, I went to see another mustang-trainer pair at a farm 10 minutes away in Eatonville, Washington. Glory, formerly known as Mustang #7425, tore at thick tufts of grass. Loriann Warner stood nearby, her sun-streaked brown hair drawn into its usual ponytail, jeans tucked into worn leather boots. Glory was her fourth MYWY mustang and one of the two mares that had come to blows during the March pickup.
Since then, Warner had worked with Glory in structured sessions three or four times a week. She methodically tapped and rubbed Glory all over with different items — a coiled lasso, a noisy tarp, her hands — and asked the horse to walk with her, stop and turn. The fighting spirit she’d witnessed in Ellensburg never resurfaced. By May, Warner was riding Glory on trails and in the lush open field at the back of this 80-acre property, where she exchanged her labor for use of the pasture and barn. She planned to keep Glory, just as she’d kept the MYWY mustang she trained in 2023, a colt named Theo who took months to warm up to her.
Warner trained her first horse at 14. She won her first-ever MYWY competition at 18. Now 32, she worked full-time with horses, training and transporting them, trimming hooves and helping “problem” animals. Although Warner worked with domesticated horses, she loved her connection with mustangs. “The way they ride for you is different, the way they look at you is different,” she said.
Mustangs have a romantic appeal: They represent “America’s heritage,” members of the training community told me. Some described the unique magic of working with wild horses compared to domesticated ones. “When you earn their trust, they’re going to be fully committed to doing whatever you want to do,” said Sam VanFleet, a professional trainer who has competed in more than a dozen makeovers.
A profound rapport is never guaranteed. But the mere possibility — something the Mustang Heritage Foundation and the BLM’s adoption literature leans into, with stunning photos, glowing quotes and minimal caveats — entices veterans and first-timers alike. (The marketing materials are designed in part to fight anti-mustang bias; many in the broader horse world scorn mustangs for having unknown bloodlines or “inferior conformation” — horse-speak for physical shape and structure.)
I saw daily posts in mustang-focused Facebook groups from people looking to re-home “project” mustangs. Reality had punctured their dreams. “I currently don’t have the time she deserves,” wrote one. Another offered a filly, adopted untrained, who was proving more difficult than expected. They hoped a more knowledgeable trainer could “easily work this out.” But even training can’t guarantee an adoption will work. I spoke to one woman who returned her mustang to its MYWY trainer in part because she didn’t “connect” with it the way a friend had with her mustang. Adopted horses have also reportedly been dumped on tribal lands, some of which already struggle with feral horse problems of their own.
But many adoptions do work out: Mustangs serve as backyard pleasure horses and as working animals on ranches, and they’ve excelled in equestrian disciplines like endurance riding and dressage. Still, success with any horse requires time, knowledge, patience, luck and money. And mustangs need extra reserves; they must first be domesticated, their trust earned.
BLM representatives say that training brightens an animal’s prospects. “Wild horses and burros often come into the adoption program with little to no human interaction, making them more challenging for the average adopter to handle,” Jason Lutterman, a BLM spokesperson, told me via email. “Training significantly increases the adoptability of a wild horse or burro and enhances the chances of a successful, lasting placement.”
“You have to be in the right place in your life to be able to afford horses. It costs everything.”
But some trainers feel troubled by the direction training programs have taken in recent years. “It’s kind of detoured,” Warner said. Instead of emphasizing bonding with horses, she said, makeovers focused on “how can we showcase them in 100 days?” Competitions force mustangs onto human timelines when it should be the other way around, she thought.
Warner also worried that TIP — now defunct — had turned into a “cash grab.” Others agreed. In TIP, horses were only gentled, not saddle-trained.Some trainers would take multiple mustangs, speed through the gentling process in the 10-day minimum and then offload the animals, said VanFleet, who trained three horses through TIP. Those trainers would cash their $1,000 checks while the adopters often struggled.
“There was a lot of ‘get the horse in and out,’” VanFleet said.
Cary Scholtes, who ran TIP for the Mustang Heritage Foundation from 2021 until it ended in September 2023, said she tried to respond to complaints. “We listened and tried to make changes to prevent those scenarios,” she said. In 2023, the program began to require trainers to submit videos provingthat a horse met TIP gentling requirements. But soon after, the BLM quit funding the program.
THE MUSTANG HERITAGE Foundation’s website says that its programs have secured homes for 24,000 wild horses and burros since 2007. The foundation is responsible for nearly 40% of all BLM animals placed into private care, according to remarks from Holle’ Waddell, division chief of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, at an advisory board meeting in June 2023.
But that’s not enough. Over the past 12 years, adoptions recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and began to increase, yet the BLM ended up selling or adopting out just 60,000 of the 95,000 horses and burros it rounded up.
The shortfall inspired a new approach: In 2019, the agency launched a controversial program that offered a $1,000 incentive for each animal adopted. Adoptions surged in response, including those within Mustang Heritage Foundation programs. The BLM claims that the incentive more than doubled the number of horses it placed into private care from 2019 to 2023, compared to the previous five years. For every horse placed in a private home, the BLM shifts the costs of its care — an estimated $15,000 to $27,500 over a horse’s lifetime — to someone else.
But the incentive program also put more horses at risk of slaughter. The BLM defines a successful adoption in simple terms: Someone else receives the horse’s title. After that, the agency’s legal authority over the animal ends, as does its ability to track it. A 2021 New York Times report found that some adopters, motivated by the $1,000 incentive, “dumped” horses at slaughter auctions once they received their checks.In March 2025, the program was suspended after a federal judge concluded the program violated federal laws, and suggested that the slaughter of wild horses was “fairly traceable” to it.
Lutterman, the BLM spokesperson, said that BLM spending on mustang training programs thus provides intangible value beyond adoption figures. “Programs like the Extreme Mustang Makeover and the Trainer Incentive Program trained thousands of horses,” he wrote in an email, “increasing the likelihood of successful, long-term placements.” They also boosted public awareness of wild horse adoptions and built a network of trainers. In the years following the 2008 economic crisis, when overall horse ownership declined, the Mustang Heritage Foundation “likely helped preserve adoption numbers to the greatest extent possible,” he added.
Still, the glut of wild horses is great, the demand limited. Market prices reflect this: A century ago, when horses were tools rather than pets, a mustang might be worth $300, or more than $8,700 today. In contrast, a 2019 study from the journal Sustainability examined BLM internet adoptions from 2012 to 2014 and found their average price at the time to be $234. The cost of a domesticated horse, meanwhile, can start at thousands of dollars. While some enthusiasts are willing to pay those prices for wild horses, the majority of potential horse-buyers tend to doubt that mustangs are worth the time, effort and money — if they’re even aware that mustangs are available.
For every horse placed in a private home, the BLM shifts the costs of its care — an estimated $15,000 to $27,500 over a horse’s lifetime — to someone else.
The study also found that while saddle training boosted the sale price by more than half, halter-trained horses — ones that receive a level of training similar to TIP’s — did not command higher prices. And while TIP and Extreme Mustang Makeovers appeared to boost a horse’s value among mustang enthusiasts, the authors acknowledged that “the effect of these programs on demand for wild horses among the general population is, to our knowledge, unknown.” For all of the BLM’s focus on getting animals adopted, the study noted, little research has been done to understand why people adopt mustangs, why they don’t, or what would convince them to.
The BLM continues to support training programs, but it’s changing tack on how. Shultz attributed the agency’s decision not to renew its contract with the Mustang Heritage Foundation in September 2023 to recent turnover among the nonprofit’s executive directors, saying the instability made the BLM “nervous.” Lutterman refused to comment, saying only that the agency “remains deeply committed to programs that help place wild horses and burros into good homes, including adult and youth regional training programs.”
Local mustang challenges scrambled over the year following the BLM’s announcement. Some groups, like MYWY, fundraised and applied directly to the BLM for grants. Others, like the Wyoming Mustang Association, simply canceled their challenges. In November, however, the BLM announced that it would distribute up to $25 million to five training organizations over five years, MYWY among them. Most of the new funding — up to $16 million — would go to a nonprofit called Forever Branded to “establish a network of equine trainers to train and gentle wild horses and burros for adoption.”
The Mustang Heritage Foundation is now working with the U.S. Forest Service, which manages far fewer wild horses than the BLM. As the nonprofit finalizes its new strategy, it’s still organizing an Extreme Mustang Makeover in 2025, and is working to secure private donations, according to Shultz. “We’re not married to an event or a historic style of doing something,” he said. “The point is, we want to create demand for America’s mustangs.”
MYWY HELD ITS 2024 MUSTANG challenge in August at the King County Expo Center in Enumclaw, Washington. Over the first two days, horses underwent vet checks and performed set routines to demonstrate their training. The morning of the third and final day dawned cool as the trainers prepared their horses for their freestyle routines. Marjie Hicks saddled Roulette and Casino, then shook silver glitter into their manes and tails.
Hicks led Roulette into the arena and through an archway that dangled pool noodles and strips of bubble wrap. She directed the horse onto a low platform, then sent her in figure-eights around two cones. Roulette nudged an exercise ball with her forelegs and fearlessly approached an active bubble dispenser. When Roulette’s routine was over, Hicks changed shirts and grabbed Casino from a friend. Horse and trainer walked into the ring to the opening riffs of Toy Story’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Casino, her dapples brilliant, stepped her front hooves onto a round platform and pivoted 180 degrees. Then Hicks led Casino to a picnic blanket that crinkled like a plastic grocery bag underneath her hooves. The horse remained composed.
Both mustangs performed beautifully.But as she left the arena, Hicks sagged with worry. She hadn’t been laid off, but money was still tight, and she felt pressure to find homes for Casino and Roulette. The day before, she’d put each horse through its tests, demonstrating that the animal could load into a trailer, turn, halt, back up on command and more. A judge scored every move, and prizes awaited. But the auction, scheduled to begin in five hours, had no registered bidders. Aside from putting up a few posters at local tack stores, MYWY had marketed the challenge only through Facebook. BLM staff were concerned that word had mostly reached people who already knew about the event.
Meanwhile, Warner and Glory awaited their freestyle turn, surrounded by a gaggle of family, including kids. Warner wore a black show shirt, jeweled belt and cowboy hat, but otherwise both horse and rider were unadorned. Concentration smoothed Warner’s face as she entered the arena, tapping Glory’s sides with a rustling tarp and then her lasso, as she’d done a thousand times before. She dismounted, pulled the saddle from Glory’s back, hopped up bareback, jumped a line of small logs, then urged Glory into a gallop. The crowd roared.
“You did so good!” Warner crowed, rubbing Glory’s face.
Around 2 p.m., two dozen trainers lined up in the arena for awards based on the weekend’s cumulative scores. Susan Clogston, MYWY’s director, presided once again. Hicks took sixth place in her division with Roulette and fifth place with Casino. Warner won the top prize in her division with Glory, earning $2,500.
The auction was scheduled to follow. Clogston turned to the bleachers and asked anyone who planned to bid to raise a hand. She scanned the crowd, and waited. No hands went up.
“If that’s the case. …”
There would be no auction. Trainers who hadn’t already found adopters would have to find homes for their mustangs themselves — 16 horses in total. (MYWY later claimed that BLM-approved bidders were present, just notenough to justify holding an auction.)
Exhausted and discouraged, Hicks packed up and loaded the horses back into her trailer. She had just spent five months preparing Casino and Roulette to live with someone else. Now she felt she had let them down. Still, she would continue feeding them, training them and loving them — and spreading the word that she had two beautiful mustangs, waiting for the right home.
M. Scott Brauer is a documentary photographer based in Seattle by way of Montana, China and Massachusetts, whose work explores power, politics and society.
Reporting for this story was supported by an award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources (www.IJNR.org).
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This article appeared in the April 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “To Train a Horse.”
