WildMustangs

Wild Mustangs

About Funny Face

This is what the Institute of Range and the American Mustang wrote about for Funny Face's background:

Funny Face's coat gleams like black satin in the prairie sun. This little mare was found and rescued at Murderer's Creek, Oregon in 1987. She was eventually sent to Bloomfield, Nebraska to the Bureau of Land Management holding facility and was released on the Black Hills Sanctuary in South Dakota on September 30, 1988.

Once she was the wildest mustang on the sanctuary. Once, she even jumped the fence when a new foal was born to another mare and helped her raise it. Through the years she has raised several of her own and taught them to survive in the back country. She is a creature of the wind, loving the most precipitous slopes of the pine-clad mountains. For a time she was inseparable with a little mare we called Shaggy Roan, but the two of them had a falling out and now Funny Face seems to prefer the company of more active mares. Sometimes the two old friends approach and touch noses and spend a few minutes grazing together but soon they drift apart, each returning to different mesa.

Funny Face & Shaggy Roan

The Institute

The Institute of Range and the American Mustang, founded in 1988 by Dayton O. Hyde, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to give freedom and a quality of life to America's wild horses. The Institute manages an eleven thousand acre sanctuary in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Here on this range, looking much as it did three hundered years ago, several hundered wild horses run free.

Imagine a place where, as far as the eye can see, miles and miles to the horizon, you can view America as it was some three hundered years ago. A place long revered by the American Indians. A place where the Cheyenne River flows in all four directions and eagle shadows sweep rocky canyon walls. A place where wild horses run free across endless prairie, hooves striking thunder, manes and tails flying in the wind.

Ranges are fenced in large, carefully managed units and herd production is controlled. From May to September, specially trained guides take people on two-hour tours of the horse range, giving comprehensive talks on the wild horses, the short grass prairie, geological features, history and ancient cliff art dating back over ten thousand years.

With your help, IRAM plans to add more land to the sanctuary, giving more wild mustangs a good life and keeping a genetic treasure alive and well.

Information

For more info on IRAM's programs, please contact:

Institute of Range and the American Mustang

Box 998, Hot Springs, SD 57747

(605)-745-5955