MUSTANG BREED
The american Mustang is a light horse breed. Light pony breeds sometimes weigh less than 1,500 pounds. They’re sometimes used as riding horses for leisure and trail riding. Being agile and swift, many are also used on the racetrack, in the show ring, and for work on the ranch.
The mustang is descending from horse breeds first brought to North America by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The horses eventually broke free to run wild and breed on the open prairies. The mustang rambled free in great numbers than any other wild horses on earth, banding together in herds to guard themselves from wolves, coyotes and other predators.
Mustangs come in all varieties of size, shapes, and colours, with the average height being around 14.2 hands. The most typical colours are bay and sorrel, but they come in buckskin, appaloosa, zebra striped dun, grulla ( slate gray ), roan, palomino, and paint.
Pony CARE AND FEEDING
The Mustang’s ancestors ran wild in the Americas, and they developed into a hardy breed with straightforward nutritive requirements. Mustangs had to survive on small amounts of grass and brush so they tend to be easy keepers and maintain weight on fairly low amounts of feed.
The Mustang is a fairly low maintenance breed that does well in most settings. The breed does just as well in pasture or in a barn or box stall.
PATTERN
Mustangs form little herds that provide friendship and protection against predators. A herd is composed of one horse and his harem of 2 to 8 mares, their foals, and diverse young mustangs. A herd will ramble and graze in a specific territory. It will put up with the presence of other herds on the outskirts of its range, and will sometimes join them in warding off attacks from predators. When the herd is challenged by an attacker, an older female, called a lead mare, will lead the herd away from danger while the stallion remains to test the aggressor. It’ll snort wildly while pawing the ground with his front hoofs to raise a cloud of dust.
BREEDING
The mating season is from Apr to July. The foals are born the following spring. When it is time to give birth, the mares leave the herd and bear their foals alone in well-hidden locations. Although adult mustangs have a wide selection of coat colors, newborn foals have coats that mix in with the dusty ground of their habitat.
The foals are able to stand inside one or two hours of birth. After 2-3 days, mummy and foal join the herd and remain with it for a year or longer. When the male colts reach about 3 years of age, they’re driven from the herd by the horse. The colts are too young to attract female, so they make a herd of their own with which they ramble for one or two years. They now and then challenge the leader of other herds, until they are successful in creating a herd of their own.
FOOD AND FEEDING
Like all horses, the mustang is a herbivore, eating nothing but vegetation. due to the scarcity and low nutritional value of the coarse grass, sagebrush, and juniper which it eats, it has changed to survive on a diet that would not sustain domesticated horses. Centuries of living in such oppressive conditions have enabled the mustang to go without water for several days if necessary. The mustang has also learned the correct way to break open frozen springs and to clear sediment-clogged water holes by splashing and digging to extricate the waste. It will even gnaw prickly pear cactus to get moisture from the plant’s juices.
MUSTANG AND MAN
By the late eighteenth century, mustangs were well established in nine western states and numbered between two and 5,000,000. Then, as settlers moved west and started to cultivate the land, the mustangs were driven off and finished by the thousands. The greatest elimination of the mustangs has taken place in this century ; massive numbers were held and employed in both the Boer War and World War I. Others were caught and used as cow ponies, and a lot more were shot to be used as pet food and manure. By the mid-19608242;s, their numbers were reckoned at between eighteen thousand and 34,000, and by the early 1970s, there were less than ten thousand.
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