Mustang Makeover

By Nick Fortuna
As long as you’re a healthy, four-legged mammal, chances are you’re welcome at Tom Olive’s farm in Ocala. Besides the 10 horses there, Olive cares for a pet goat, dogs, kittens, guinea pigs, chickens and even a pot-bellied pig. But it’s the newest addition to the farm, a 4-year-old bay mustang, that could give Olive a claim to fame.
   
Olive is one of two Florida trainers participating in the Extreme Mustang Makeover, a competition created by the Mustang Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that gives trainers 100 days to gentle and train wild mustangs that were captured on public lands in Nevada.

Trainers from 38 states were selected for the competition after going through an application process and were then assigned a horse through a lottery system. A panel of eight judges will evaluate the horses on their overall body condition, their performance in an “in-hand” or “leading” competition – in which the trainer will walk the horse through a series of obstacles – and a “horse course” – which requires the trainer to ride the horse through obstacles and in a series of patterns.
The other trainer representing the Sunshine State is Ashley Stevenson, of Loxahatchee in South Florida.

Now in its second year, the Extreme Mustang Makeover will be held Sept. 18-21 at the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Forth Worth, Texas.

Last year, the competition featured 100 trainers and horses and $25,000 in prize money, but due to strong interest in the event, the field has been doubled this year and the purse increased to $50,000. The competition separates the trainers into three skill levels, with the top 10 in each division winning prizes ranging from $400 to $12,500.  

The mustangs, which had never been handled by humans, were captured by the Bureau of Land Management, which seeks to control their numbers to ensure the health of the herd and protect rangeland resources.

Thousands of these horses are made available for adoption each year, and the horses in the competition will be auctioned off at the event, with the trainers receiving 20 percent of the money paid for their individual horses. The trainers also get $500 to cover expenses. All of the horses are 3- or 4-year-old geldings and have coats of solid colors, since they are less likely to be adopted than horses with “flashier” coats, said Patti Colbert, executive director of the Mustang Heritage Foundation.

Last year, all 100 horses in the competition were adopted, with the average horse selling for $2,300, Colbert said.

For Olive, communicating with a wild mustang isn’t as hard as it might sound. Having grown up on a farm in rural Bascom, Fla., just south of the Alabama border, the 68-year-old trainer doesn’t quite feel at home without the company of four-legged friends.
  
  “I’m into animals,” he said. “I can communicate with them better than with people, I think, since I was raised way out on the farm away from everybody. Bascom is a little, two-store town. I don’t guess anybody’s ever come from Bascom except me and Faye Dunaway. I was raised on a farm up there. There were mules and workhorses, and we grew peanuts, cotton and corn.”
   
Olive said he and a friend began training horses for their neighbors when they were 12 and enjoyed the work so much that they envisioned making a living at it. When he was in his late teens and living in the Orlando area, he saw a neighbor come home from a horse show with ribbons and trophies and decided he didn’t want to miss out on the next one. With no trailer in which to transport his horse, he rode his horse about 12 miles to a horse show in Apopka and “won just about everything.”      
   
From there, Olive said he began a nomadic existence training and racing Quarter Horses and Thoroughbreds at tracks across the United States, everywhere from Minnesota to New Mexico. “I’ve raced at every track in America with Quarter Horses, I’d imagine,” he said. After growing “tired of living like a gypsy,” Olive bought his farm in Ocala in 1993 and went to work training Thoroughbreds at a nearby farm.
   
“They gave me a little Arabian that didn’t make it,” Olive said. “I kept him a month or so and trained him and took him down to this little auction and sold him. I was riding him with no bridle and making him slide stop, and they started bidding on him, and one lady stood up and said, ‘I don’t want your horse. I just want to know who trained him.’ So I said I did, and then about 50 people followed me back to the stall wanting my phone number.”

Ever since, Olive has made his living training difficult horses.

“A lot of Thoroughbred farms have bad studs they can’t breed because they’ll fight you or something, so they bring them here and I desensitize them and get them to where you can handle them,” Olive said. “If anyone has a problem horse, I fix them. I guess I’m pretty good at it, but if you enjoy something, you are good at it.”

Olive picked up his mustang in Illinois on June 13 and drove him back to his farm. After letting the horse rest for a day, the trainer got right to work, using an approach-and-retreat technique to gradually gain the horse’s trust. Eight days into the training process, Olive had his pupil under his thumb. He could be seen sitting atop the horse, which was now comfortable with a saddle and would allow the trainer to pick up each of his hooves.

With his neck and muscular shoulders drenched in sweat on a hot Florida morning, the horse seemed like a linebacker a week into double-session football practices – well cared for but exhausted from training and willing to do whatever was asked of him. The heat wouldn’t allow him to reveal if he still had a rebellious streak.       
“You have to be able to read them and understand them,” Olive said. “Horses communicate. They’re kind of like kids. You have to challenge him and take it a step at a time. You have to desensitize them. He was a wild animal. He’s a flee animal, so he’d escape if he could. But if you get him cornered, he’d fight.

“You don’t really have to put much pressure on a horse to get him to respond. And when he responds in the right direction, the way you want him to move, you instantly take the pressure off. He learns from the release of pressure. You don’t have to hit one very hard or do anything that way. It’s mostly communication. Every time a horse starts responding and coming around, it just gives you a good feeling, like you’ve accomplished something. A horse can learn five to eight times faster than a man can, but you have to get his attention and start communicating with him.”
   
Though obviously muscular, Olive’s horse doesn’t appear to be athletically gifted, making the trainer wonder whether he has a chance of winning the competition. Olive said he saw several horses at the competition he would rather have worked with and even tried to trade with others trainers. But what the horse lacks in athleticism he appears to be making up for with intelligence, leading Olive to consider naming him Einstein.
 
For Olive, winning the competition would offer some notoriety and a sense of accomplishment, but the real purpose of all the countless hours he has spent with his mustang has less to do with self-interest and more to do with his love for animals.
   
“I just want my horse to be the best, and if they pay a lot for him when they auction him off, I’ll figure he’s got a good home,” Olive said. “He’s just not as athletic as some of the other ones, but I can teach him. If I make him the best, someone will take good care of him, and he’ll have a good life.”