Mill Swamp Indian Horse Views: A Place Of Love

Anyone can do what we do. Everyone would benefit from doing what we do. Mill Swamp Indian Horse Views: A Place Of Love: That is how author Doris Gwaltney described our horse lot. "This place changes lives. It changed our lives." " Wh...

Mill Swamp Indian Horse Views: Do That Which Is Right....

This old post tells how our program began. Mill Swamp Indian Horse Views: Do That Which Is Right....: That was the simple advice that a very wise old man gave me after I was first elected to the county Board of Supervisors at age 27. By th...

Build A Program Of Your Own

Margaret Matray's excellent article, "Healing Ground" in the February 23 edition of the Virginian Pilot went, as the phrase goes, "viral". I am delighted that it did. It gave America a chance to read the work of one of the best young journalist that I have ever met and it gave everyone a chance to meet Ashley and Peter. Ashley is one of the brighter spots in my life and her horse Peter is well matched with an owner who loves him and who learns with him and from him.

I am even more pleased that we have been contacted by people who want to learn how to build a program like ours. That is what I want more than anything else.

I would love to have people come down and spend a few days with us and see how we do things in order to learn to build a program like ours, or one even better than ours.

What we do is important, but it is also attainable. Anyone who cares about kids and horses and will work to teach natural horsemanship to kids for horses can do what we do.

The first thing to do is to get rid of that nagging voice in your head that says, "It can't be done." It is that same nagging voice that says things like, "Four formerly wild stallions could never be gentled and trained and even if they could they could never be ridden together."

(The picture above is of four formerly wild stallions that we gentled and trained about to go off on a ride together.)

A New Reality

Sometimes it takes getting hit pretty hard by reality for one to get the assumptions knocked out of them. As our program develops and expands the tension between looking "nice" and being authentic has never been stronger. I am willing to spend what I must and work as hard as I can for projects that increase our educational capability or for those that are functional in protecting and providing for the animals.

I will not spend a penny or lift a finger for "improvements" that would make us look like a petting zoo. It is even more important for our operation to be real, honest, and authentic than it would be for others. We routinely do things that are not viewed as possible. Children tame and train wild horses, crippled horses are healed and ridden thousands of miles without further problems, a fifteen year old stallion is trained to saddle and takes to the woods as if he had been doing it all of his life, a ten year old boy with cerebral palsy becomes the first person to mount a small string of wild horses, formerly wild mustangs approach visitors to be handled, and ridden, some of the oldest and rarest distinct genetic grouping of American horses, rare colonial goats and chickens walk around visitors' feet, hams and smoked meat hang from a real smokehouse where they were cured---yes that is real. That is what we do.

That is why we can never take a single step to make our facility look like a Bush Gardens exhibit.

This weekend a family of city people spent much of the afternoon at the horse lot. They were mesmerized by the sights, smells, and sounds of a real agricultural operation--an operation as real as the horses that I ride, the eggs that I eat and the hogs that I raise, slaughter and eat.

Dan has built a beautiful kiosk that will advance our educational efforts immeasurably. It will be impossible to look at the structure and not walk over to see what is posted on it. One cannot look at the smokehouse without asking about it.

Education does not begin with answers. Real education begins with questions. I want all of our visitors to be filled with questions that they can't keep to themselves. I want them to feel like they are going to explode if someone does not answer their question, "What's that?"

I bet if you pulled into our horse lot and saw the structure in the picture above you would ask the first person that you saw at the horse lot, "What's that?"

On the other hand if you pulled into the horse lot and saw an beautiful, modern visitors center you question would just as likely be , "Where are the soda machines?"

(Don't worry we won't be having any soda machines.)

The Spanish Mustang Foundation...

...has a brand new website www.spanishmustangfoundation.org. Go check it out. Look at their photo gallery. Check out the great pictures of Sundowner, the grandfather of our mare, Snow On Her. Take a look at Son of Sailor, whose father was born in Corolla and who spent years as a herd stallion at the Cayuse.

Study what is going on out there at the Spanish Mustang Foundation.

And support them--in every way you can. Send them a check--become part of the great work that they are doing.

(This is a shot of Daddy and the little half Corolla colt, Red Fox.)