Penny has a new friend, a 4-year-old mustang named Onyx.
One day a few months ago my brain hatched an idea. I found myself thinking about it a lot, but I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or a bad one. Typically, I know if an idea is good or bad. This time I wasn’t sure.
After several days of obsessing, I brought it up with my Fix-It Farmer Shawn as we drove to church on a bright Sunday morning.
“So I had an idea, but I’m not sure if it’s a good one,” I told him.
In our almost 40 years of marriage, I know I can trust Shawn to give me his honest assessment of what might be a crazy idea.
“You know how we’ve been talking about getting Penny a friend?” I asked.
“Yeah, you’ve been talking about that since we moved here,” he responded.
Horses are herd animals and Penny had a small herd at the lesson barn where I boarded her in Texas. But at Plum Prairie Ranch in Kansas she only had the small cow-calf herd over the fence, when they chose to come up from the back pasture. Much of the time, she was all by herself in her pasture and paddock.
“Penny likes young mares, and the Wild Horse Youth Challenge is happening at the Kansas State Fair in a few weeks. Kids are raising young mustang mares to show them at the fair. Then they auction off several of the mustangs at the end.”
I waited for him to digest that information, but he was quick to respond, “I’ve always liked the idea of having a mustang,” he said. “I think you should look into it.”
That started my deep dive into the world of gentling mustangs.
Wild Horse Youth Challenge
My top choice: the winning yearling mustang and teen handler at the 2026 Wild Horse Youth Challenge in Hutchinson, KS.
After looking into the Wild Horse Youth Challenge program, Shawn and I decided to go see their Saturday competition at the fair. If we liked what we saw, we would come back on Sunday for the auction and potentially take a filly home with us.
I made a point of filling out paperwork with U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials so we would be approved to take home a mustang.
Kids competed in three age divisions (9-11, 12-14, 15-18) and three rounds of competition: Conditioning & Handling, Trail Class and Freestyle. Since these horses are way too young to ride, competitors lead horses by halter and lead rope.
Conditioning & Handling involved basic ground work maneuvers and the judges’ inspection of the horse’s body condition.
Trail Class offered numerous obstacles and challenges like walking over a small rocking bridge, backing between fake boulders, allowing the handler to apply fly spray and pick up all four feet and loading into a trailer.
Freestyle meant a performance where the handler could use props, costumes and music to showcase the training and temperament of their young horse.
Red roan filly and young handler at 2026 Wild Horse Youth Challenge.
The kids did a phenomenal job with these fillies. They pick them up in May and have four months to train them.
Out of more than 20 handler/horse pairs in the contest, just six planned to auction their horses. All the others decided to keep their young mustangs.
After the competition ended, potential bidders got the chance to meet the auction horses and their handlers. I met the horse who won the contest and felt an immediate connection as the horse nuzzled my hand. Her young handler is an extremely gifted trainer.
I decided to “go all in” on her, but she was the second-to-last horse to be auctioned. This filly ended up going for way more than any of the others and above the budget Shawn and I had set. In hind sight, I should have bid on the first filly, a gorgeous strawberry roan that Shawn really liked, because it went too cheap, in our opinion.
So we went home without a friend for Penny, but we learned at the Wild Horse Youth Challenge that there would soon be another mustang auction in our town.
Prison-trained mustangs
For 25 years, Kansas Correctional Industries at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility has partnered with the Bureau of Land Management to gentle and train wild horses with the goal of getting them into good homes. In the past several years, the program has been in limbo with news that it could soon be shut down. Right before their 2026 Open House and Auction event, KCI managers learned the program would be renewed for five more years.
This is great news for the mustang community, the minimum custody residents who work in the program and for this whole region. I follow a number of horse trainers on social media who come here to get their mustangs.
Without herd management, many of the mustangs would starve, especially with recent western droughts.
We met a number of the men who work with the mustangs, and they are a dedicated, conscientious bunch. The program takes in hundreds of wild horses each month, and the trainers work with dozens at a time.
Members of the public who are approved by the BLM to take in mustangs can adopt an unhandled horse or a horse with some training.
Just two weeks after I whiffed on my chance to get a mustang at the Wild Horse Youth Challenge, we attended the BLM/KCI Wild Horse and Burro annual open house and auction.
The facility where they house and train the mustangs is excellent. There are large pens for groups of unhandled horses, smaller pens with good space for horses in training, an arena, several round pens and an obstacle course. They also have an indoor area where they hold the auction and could work with horses in cold weather.
One of the trainers said that they often take horses in saddle training on short trail rides to the creek on the south end of the property.
The open house
Beth was trained to ride and drive. She was my second choice at the KCI auction.
Held on a Friday afternoon, the annual open house was an informal event where we could walk around the facility and observe horses under saddle and in pens.
They also provided a notebook that included information on each of the horses up for auction the next day.
Trainers ranked the horses on a number of skills, both in halter and under saddle, from 1 to 5 with 1 being bad and 5 excellent. Ranked skills included how easy the horse is to halter and touch, saddle, mount and dismount, how well it leads, picks up feet, moves forward, backward and stops both in halter and under saddle, and more.
Shawn and I spent several hours watching trainers work with horses and talking with some of the handlers. I studied the notebook and made notes on horses to bid on in the auction.
Mustangs tend to be smaller than other horse breeds. To survive in the wild, they’re often living on sub-optimal nutrition. I eliminated a number of auction horses because they were smaller than 14.2 hands, meaning they’re technically ponies. Shawn and I are both taller than average, so I wanted our horse to not be too short.
After talking with handlers and looking at the horse ratings, I identified my top three picks and another three secondary picks.
My top two were among the tallest horses at the auction: a 15.3 hand 5-year-old liver chestnut mare named Beth and a 15.1 hand 4-year-old solid black gelding named Truffle. Taken from the Muskrat Basin Horse Management Area in central Wyoming in 2024, both horses were praised for their easygoing personalities.
Beth’s handler said the horse was gentle enough to put a grandkid on her back. Beth had been trained to drive and ride. A young man from the nearby Amish community taught five of the mustangs to drive, four of them in pairs with Beth as a solo horse.
We watched Truffle’s rider put him through paces at the walk and trot, and he responded well to cues. The rider told us that when he just wants to go out and sit on a horse and enjoy the sunshine, he picks Truffle.
I asked him if that meant the horse was lazy and he said, “No, just very laid back.”
I asked the program manager which horse he thought would be the best for a home that had never had a mustang and older people who don’t want to get bucked off, and he pointed out Truffle.
A bidding war
Onyx was saddle trained at Kansas Correctional Industries in Hutchinson.
The next day we came back to the auction with a game plan. Truffle and Beth were our top choices, and we set a maximum budget. We had a rundown of the auction order, and Truffle was No. 3 and Beth No. 7 out of 23 horses listed.
We arrived early to get a last look at the horses. As we wandered around the holding pens, we met a couple from Iowa. The wife is a veteran mustang trainer who was looking to purchase a few wild horses after the auction for the saddle trained mustangs.
She has a Facebook page, Mendy’s Mustangs, where she offers helpful advice, features her current horses in training and then helps them find good homes. Mendy was soooo encouraging to this mustang newbie, and she thoroughly agreed that Truffle was a great option for us. I sat by Mendy and her husband during the auction for moral support.
I definitely felt the butterflies when the auction began. The first two horses showed nervousness when they entered the auction ring in the large metal building, but Truffle was different. Instead of shying away from the railing that separated the ring from the audience in bleachers, he looked at everything with confident interest.
The auctioneer said that Truffle had been one of a handful of horses to take part in the BLM/KCI mustang exhibit at the Kansas State Fair a few weeks earlier.
The trainer’s notes on Truffle said that he “is a calm horse that has always desensitized quickly. He is very curious and loves to explore new places.”
The bidding for Truffle quickly climbed far above the price of the first two horses. I kept bidding because it hadn’t hit our maximum.
We won the bidding war, and he tied for the top bid at the whole auction. Just four horses sold for $1,500 or more and he was one of them. About half the horses went for more than $600. The first $125 goes to the BLM and the rest goes to KCI to support the wild horse training program.
One of the trainers loaded Truffle onto our trailer and we took him to his new home at Plum Prairie Ranch.
New horse on the ranch
Onyx stayed in the cattle working pen for his first week with us. He met Penny over the fence before we put them together.
We got him settled in his new paddock, which is the cattle working pen, because it has sturdy five-foot pipe panel fencing. He could meet Penny over the fence, but I would not put them in the same space until our boy settled into his new environment.
When I first got Penny, the barn owner told me to put her in a paddock with another mare. It did not go well and I had to doctor a gash on her stifle from a kick just hours after bringing her home.
Our new horse needed a new name because Shawn wasn’t a fan of “Truffle.” He wanted something more impressive for a stunning black mustang. I suggested Onyx because it is a stone that is most prized in its solid black, shiny form.
Onyx came to us a little under weight, and I was concerned that he would turn his giant Roman nose up at the grain we feed every morning. At KCI, he ate grass hay and alfalfa.
In my research, a lot of mustang owners said they had to train their wild horse to eat grain by adding sweet feed or molasses. I decided to try it with the same camolina oil supplement and a little salt like I give Penny. The only difference is he gets two pumps of oil because he needs to gain weight and my plump Penny only gets one.
As soon as Onyx smelled the grain he got right in there and gobbled it up. He loves the grain and supplement and needed no coaxing to eat every bite. He also adores his evening grass hay. His appetite is every bit as good as Penny’s.
After one week of living next to each other, we opened the gate and allowed the two horses to occupy the same spaces.
They spent a few days just feeling each other out, with Penny giving him her mare ears and squeals if she didn’t like what he did.
Several days in, though, Onyx went to Penny’s spot to eat grain and refused to move, even after I put his bucket in his usual spot and waited before setting out another bucket.
Penny stood back and then went over to eat at Onyx’s bucket, forcing me to feed him where he stood.
Onyx has left one bite mark on Penny’s rear and kicked at her several times. She scraped her head on the fence in one such kicking display.
The end result is my mare that bossed other horses around in her Texas pasture is content to follow someone else’s lead at PPR.
I think that Onyx hasn’t had to do much because he is a naturally confident fellow.
Training together
Shawn lunging Onyx in our round pen.
Now we’re in training mode, and Shawn has jumped in with both feet, even taking riding lessons so we can both work with the horses.
Onyx tends to be “mouthy,” trying to get his lips on you whenever he can, and doesn’t respect personal space. He’s like a thousand pound puppy dog.
The trainers at KCI did a great job of getting him used to the saddle, bridle and riding around. Shawn surprised me by hopping on him in our round pen recently. I wanted to wait until an experienced trainer put some rides on him, but Shawn thought Onyx was so chill that he’d do fine. And Shawn was right.
He even took Onyx to our instructor for lessons, who confirmed that there are lots of holes in the horse’s basic knowledge.
She told him that he could ride this green horse and not get hurt because Onyx was so laid back and to spend most of his time with the horse improving his ground work and manners.
So that’s what we’re doing, and I’m thrilled. What had just been “my thing” for the past five and a half years – 18 months of lessons before getting Miss Penny on Halloween in 2022 – is now “our thing.”
I originally regretted not getting a yearling at the Wild Horse Youth Challenge, but because our KCI mustang is saddle trained, Shawn wanted to start riding right away. So I’m thankful for the horse we brought home.
Embracing a God-given passion
Shawn with Onyx, a 4-year-old mustang from Muskrat Basin BLM Horse Management Area in Wyoming.
I grew up one of those horse-crazy girls. My walls were covered in horse posters. I read horse books and played with my Breyer horse figurines. I rode horses whenever I could, which wasn’t much except when I went to summer Girl Scout camp in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
Fast forward about 40 years, and Shawn encouraged me to revive my interest in horses in preparation for our move to Plum Prairie Ranch. After all, a ranch SHOULD have horses, am I right?
Now I’m living my horse dreams. Penny often comes to greet me and stands next to me for pets. We recently went on a trail ride in a lovely nearby state park. And I enjoy helping Onyx learn new skills.
But it’s not always rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes it’s hard, messy or painful. I’ve doctored gory wounds, lost sleep worrying and even gone to the ER myself. But that’s life. Anything that is meaningful requires effort, risk and loss.
Some dreams are part of who God made us to be.
“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” – Ephesians 2:10
God created each of us with all our interests and passions. He put us in the exact situations, families, time in history and locations where He wanted us to shine His light. When you see someone using their passions to glorify God it’s inspiring. Whether it’s singing or playing praises, sending notes or cards, creating a quilt, preparing meals, teaching children or giving hugs, you can point others to Jesus. God gave you desires that He wants to use in your life to glorify Him.
I think God can use my love of horses to reach other people who love horses so I can share the love of Jesus.
Embracing our God-given passions brings us joy, and God wants us to be filled with joy. Joy isn’t dependent on our circumstances. It depends on the unfailing love of the Lord Jesus Christ. When we’re doing what God created us to do, we experience His joy.
So what about you, dear reader? Is there something you loved when you were young that you can do now? Maybe you already enjoy an activity — or want to explore a new one — that could show God’s love to others.
Take hold of the joy, peace and hope that comes from allowing God to harness your interests for His glory. And allow Him to direct your day whether you’re riding a scenic trail or shoveling horse manure. May the Lord shine His love through us in the epic adventures and most mundane tasks because the world needs the hope that only comes through Him.
“I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in Him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” – Romans 15:13
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