Suzanne Meyers, owner of Next Level Horsemanship just completed her annual Wild Mustang Adoption on Saturday May 12th. Next Level acts as a, BLM Term, "Store Front" each year for this program. She received 20 Mustangs and 17 were adopted on Saturday. There are special requirements for adoption and, should you be interested, Suzanne can explain them. Think a Mustang might be too much for you to handle, Suzanne can "gentle" him or her before you take them home.
Suzanne is a "TIP" Trainer. The Mustang Heritage Foundation created the Trainer Incentive Program, which is better known as TIP, to bridge the gap between the public and excess wild horses held in off-range corrals. TIP supports a network of hundreds of horse trainers who gentle, train and find homes for wild horses and burros. To read more about this click HERE .
Mustang adoptions are down the past few years and that is why this program is so important. If you are interested in adopting please check in with Suzanne for one of the three remaining at her facility.
Click here for a 3 minute slideshow of the Mustang's arrival at Next Level Horsemanship
Excerpt from author Ben Masters published Feb 6th 2017 in National Geographic:
"As of March 1, 2016, there were 67,000 horses and burros on public lands and 45,000 in government holding pens. Computer models show that the current population, including foals born in 2016, is approximately 75,000 wild horses and burros. The controversial nationwide Appropriate Management Level (AML), defined as “the number of horses to have thriving ecological balance with the vegetation, wildlife, and livestock usage,” is 27,000.
As of March 1, 2016, there were nearly 13,500 wild horses and burros living in feedlot-type short-term holding pens and another 31,500 living in long-term pastures. Take a minute and let those numbers sink in. All 45,000 of these wild animals were gathered off the range, segregated by sex, castrated, branded, given shots, and doomed to sit in a feedlot for about five years. They have been or will be released onto a foreign pasture in the Midwest bearing no resemblance of their former wild lifestyle. Each horse will live on that long-term pasture until he gets old, or has organ failure or an injury. Then he will be destroyed in as humane a manner as possible.
The cost for all 45,000 of these horses is approximately $50,000 per horse over its lifetime. That’s more than twice what I paid to go to college. Although the Wild Horse and Burro Act specifically states that “The Secretary shall cause additional excess wild free-roaming horses and burros for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist to be destroyed in the most humane and cost-efficient manner possible,” this option hasn’t been utilized due to lawsuits, public outcry, and congressional riders. The expense of holding all these horses has crippled the BLM’s wild horse budget to the point where it’s spending two- thirds of its entire budget, nearly $50 million in 2016, warehousing horses in short-term and long-term pastures".
