[smrobs]

I have 2 mustangs and I love the breed. However, I agree with Kevin. I was fortunate to get the ones that I did. They are fairly well conformed with only minor flaws. However, if you are looking for a horse that you can be competative on, mustangs are probably not the best choice. They generally don't have the speed needed for most gymkhana events and they have absolutely no natural cow savvy. Everything that you want them to know, they have to be taught, even more than your regular quarter horse. Mustangs have never been bred selectively for anything other than survival and thus, have no specialized mentality. Most quarter horses, paints, appys, and even some tbs will have some natural cow sense because they have been used for that for so many generations. Mustangs don't.

That being said, if you are just looking for a companion that you can have some fun with, a mustang might be just the horse for you. However, if you are less than a very experienced horseman that has trained many horses, you should really look for one that has been trained by a professional. Training a mustang is not like training a domestic horse, their fight/flight instinct is through the roof and many of the unhandled ones will turn on you with even the slightest pressure. These horses pretty well fit into the "jack of all trades, master of none" group. They make wonderful using horses so long as looking pretty or being perfect doesn't matter. I do challenging trail rides and some ranch work (penning, sorting, roping, etc.) and mine are wonderful partners for what I do. But, I don't care if something takes all day to get finished, and sometimes it does because they are just not as proficient as other breeds.

 

[smrobs]

Kevin and WS are right. Mustangs are good all around horses. Mine are trail horses, ranch horses, roping horses. They are decent at that. Could either of them run an 18 second barrel time? Heck no. Could either of them score a 200 cutting a cow? Heck no, and 99.999% of mustangs out there couldn't no matter what training they got. Dobe will watch a cow, he learned after months and months of training and having his butt rode off one winter every day in a feedlot, but no matter how much training he gets, he is just not built to be quick and get down in the ground like a cutting bred QH and he gets beat sometimes. Not his fault, not my fault, it's just a fact of life that he will never be as good as my brothers Mr San Peppy/Doc O'Lena QH.

I will say again; if looking for a fun horse to have with no real goals, a mustang might make a good partner but if looking for something on which to be competative at gaming and cow work, a QH or Paint or Appy is the way to go. With mustangs, maybe 1 in every 10,000 would be able to be competative. With domestic breeds, it would average 1 in every 10. Most normal people would not be willing to spend the time and money to sort through those 10,000 to find the one with real potential and then spend another small fortune finding and paying a trainer that is capable of bringing out that potential. It just isn't practical for your average rider/owner, especially one who wants to compete.

As for the vids that BP posted. That is one of the main problems with those mustang trainer challenges. So many people concentrate on putting those flashy tricks on a horse and skip over a ton of the basic foundation work. The reason that the horse is wringing his tail is that the rider taught him to yeild to the pain of the spur, not the pressure of the leg. Not much of a horseman IMHO. If he would teach a horse to yield and leg him over and never use a spur, then I might begin to be impressed.