Mustang Matchmaking

“Matchmaker Matchmaker,
Make me a match
Find me a find,
Catch me a catch
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Look through your books
and make me a perfect match…”

The Search

During those heady days leading up to this past August’s BLM Wild Horse & Burro Internet Auction, where I eventually found Songwe, I must have looked at each and every one of the 75 or so horses pictured on the site about 10,000 times. Meanwhile, my friend Chelsea (of the AppalachianCenter for Wild Horses), was doing the same thing. We were both deeply ill with mustang madness. Our mutual goal? Find me the perfect mustang match.

We later joked that the BLM auction site should really be called MustangMatch.com due to its similarities to online dating sites. You are drawn to the handsome headshots, and then you click on each picture to read a profile and see more photos. You stare for hours into the eyes of each prospect, wondering if you might find a spiritual connection with that one. The only difference with the mustangs is that there is no communication, coffee dates or candlelight dinners before you get involved. You have to pick a horse based on the slim data on the available on the BLM website and what you feel in your own gut.

Hell, it’s an insane process when you think about it; choosing a wild horse to gentle and train, basically sight unseen, except for a few photos. During the process, I questioned how I had allowed Chelsea to talk me into this. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat. Fortunately, when I was about 12 years old, I was in 4-H and I entered the New York State Pictorial Horse Judging Contest. I had to judge the conformation of 10 horses based solely on four photo views: front, back, and each side. It took me less than an hour to complete my analysis. I earned the highest score in the state of NY… 98 out of 100. So I at least had some “skills” to draw on during the selection process.

So each day, for about two weeks, Chelsea and I sent links to individual horses over to each other via Facebook messenger in an attempt to narrow the field of prospects. All of them seemed viable. All were breathtakingly beautiful, all needed homes. And each had their good points and bad points. It was tough. But after endless mustang ogling, I kept coming back to Necktag #: 8619, a 2 year old grulla colored gelding. I discovered him one morning over coffee and sent his link to Chelsea to see what she thought of him. She liked him too. He was sort of plain looking, but he had very nice lines, and a soft eye, and he looked more like an "English" type horse than many of the others. Most of my training as a rider has been in dressage and general English balance seat, so his body type attracted me. Though none of the photos showed him doing anything but standing around, I could just imagine riding his smooth and floaty trot and balanced canter.

I quickly dubbed him “Mr. Grulla” and I kept imagining myself standing in front of him in a round pen. The vision was so real and vivid that I knew he was the one for me. To help with my decision, I read about the horses from the heard management area in Wyoming where he came from:

“Wild horses in the Divide Basic HMA have many domestic bloodlines in their background, including American Quarter Horse, Thoroughbred, Standardbred, Arabian, and smaller draft breeds. Nearly every coat color can be found within the herds. The animals tend to be of moderate to large size for wild horses. The combinations of size, conformation, coat colors and patterns, and excellent physical condition have become a draw for potential adopters.” – BLM Adoption Site HMA Info

Sounded pretty good!                                                                              

The Final Day of Bidding

When the final day of bidding arrived, I was a nervous wreck. Chelsea had registered with the BLM and handled the actual bidding process. She had already put a few early bids in on Mr. Grulla to test the waters in the days preceding the final day. The bid amount held pretty steady and mostly unchallenged for several days. But when we got to the final 30 minutes of bidding Mr. Grulla’s price shot up by hundreds of dollars. It was worse than eBay! Apparently someone else had also imagined him or herself standing within Mr. Grulla in a round pen. But I couldn’t let this horse go to anyone else. I felt that he was meant to be mine.

"Matchmaker Matchmaker
Make me a match,
Find me a find,
Catch me a catch
Night after night in the dark I'm alone
So find me a match of my own..."

So we persisted, texting each other back and forth like two madwomen, for ten minutes, and in the end, won the bid. $1025. Phew! A bit more than I wanted to spend on a horse I had never even met. But nevertheless, I was so excited!

A week later I left for Africa to work on a conservation project with lions. Mr. Grulla (who I eventually named Songwe after my favorite male lion cub) was scheduled to arrive in North Carolina the day I returned from Africa. And every day while I was in Africa, seeing the most amazing wildlife spread out across the plains, I daydreamed of Mr. Grulla and what lay ahead for us.

From lions to mustangs. Wow! Life was and is good!

A Horse of a Different Color

"Grulla" (aka "grullo") is a Spanish word pronounced "grew' ya" or "grew' yo." It is a rare and interesting horse color. You only see it in a few domestic horses … typically American Quarter Horses. It has primitive roots and is more common in mustangs, but still uncommon overall.

Songwe has the telltale solid stripe down his spine and dark squiggly stripes on the backs of his legs and on his neck. His head is also darker than his body. If you look closely at his picture, you can see what I am talking about. Pretty cool!

More information on the grulla color:
http://www.grullablue.com/colors/grullocolor.htm
http://glacierridge.com/grulla.htm 

A River, A Village, A Lion, and a Mustang

The Songwe River Basin divides the countries of Malawi and Tanzania. It is the target of a collaborative project between these two countries to contribute to economic growth, reduced poverty, improved health, better living conditions, and enhanced food and energy security for the people in the Songwe Basin as well as economic development of the two countries.

Songwe is also the name of a village located on 300 acres of private land, 5km downstream from  Victoria Falls on the Zambia side of the Zambezi River, perched 300 feet above the deeply incised and rugged Batoka gorge. This village is built to resemble a traditional Zambian village and the atmosphere is just as peaceful, calm and relaxed as that of the local villages.

Playing with Songwe with a stick and string

And Songwe is the name of my favorite male lion cub at Lion Encounter/Livingstone, Zambia (not far from Songwe Village). I lived onsite at Lion Encounter, inside the Mosi Oa Tunya Game Preserve, for 2 weeks in August, learning about lions and lion conservation as part of the African Lion Environmental Research Trust.


Songwe. A beautiful African word, representing three inspiring stories of Africa, the land of my dreams, still wild and untamed, inspiring, breathtaking, and heartbreaking all at once.

So I guess it isn't surprising that I chose this word as the name of my horse. I chose it for him only hours after returning to North Carolina from Africa, the red-brown dust of Zambia still stuck to my boots. And like the other Songwes, he represents something special, unique, and ambitious, because he's a 2 year old mustang that I adopted, sight-unseen, except for some photos, from the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Internet Adoption Program. 

Songwe arrived in North Carolina the same day I did, the travel dust still stuck to his coat after his long journey from Colorado where he had been living for many months in a BLM holding facility. His birthplace was the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming; a drainage basin that adjoins the Continental Divide in southern Wyoming, with mostly flat to slightly rolling foothills, and a dry, grassy landscape not unlike what I found in southern Africa. He was captured when he was just a few months old, in November of 2011. It must have been traumatic.

And so we came together, from opposite ends of the earth, both tired from our long journeys to begin a new journey together. My choice more than his. If it were his choice, he'd still be running free on the plains of the Great Divide. 



I credit my decision to adopt a mustang to my friend, Chelsea, who recently started up The Appalachian Center for Wild Horses, a non-profit designed to advocate and promote wild horse preservation and encourage mustang adoptions in the eastern U.S.. After nearly 30 years of owning domestic horses, I had been horseless, by choice, for a few years. And at age 52, quite honestly, I was okay with the path I had taken. I was done. But then Chelsea introduced me to her mustang rescue, Shiloh, which planted the seed in my head about me adopting a mustang. A crazy idea, probably...but then I had harbored a long time love affair with mustangs since childhood. I first learned of their plight when I read Marguerite Henry's "Mustang, Wild Spirit of the West" at age 10. The story of Velma Johnston ("Wild Horse Annie") inspired me to write my congressman, Rep. Jack Kemp (R), about voting to protect wild horses and burros and ending the cruel roundups that would result in maimed and tortured horses being mercilessly captured and taken to slaughter for dog food and other animal feed. The efforts of thousands of kids like me paid off, and The Wild-Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act was passed in 1971. It was a huge victory for the mustangs. (Read more about the problems facing mustangs today by visiting the American Wild Horse Preservation website.)

And so here I am, beginning a new chapter in my equine story. I don't expect this will be easy. Not by a long shot. And I have no idea how it will all turn out. I guess you could say that I have high hopes and an open mind. No matter what happens, I know that it will be an experience like no other. So I invite you to check back each week to see how the story of Songwe unfolds.

Just think...in the last few weeks, I went from walking with lions in the grasslands of Africa to walking beside a wild horse born in the grasslands of Wyoming.

Songwe. I whisper your name into the wind as your mane blows softly against my cheek.