MERCEDES — David Quiñones glanced from afar as the shaggy, hoofed giants munched on patches of hay.
The 57-year-old ranch owner was thinking of adopting one of the wild horses to roam his 2 1/2-acre ranch in McAllen.

“I thought it would be nice to get one,” the 57-year-old McAllen resident said, shrugging his shoulders casually. “What’s a ranch without a horse?”

The mustangs were on display at the Rio Grande Valley Livestock Showgrounds, 1000 N. Texas Ave., on Saturday during the last day of an adoption session organized by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.

Mustangs are wild horses descended from horses first brought to North America by the Spanish. The agency is tasked with gathering excess horses and donkeys from the wild and placing them into qualified adoptive homes to avoid overpopulation.
The bureau is not offering donkeys for adoption this year since they apparently are not exhausting vegetation and water sources in the wild.

Taming a large, wild animal is no easy feat. Furthermore, caring for the animals can be costly and requires great patience. But for horse trainer Jessica Frantz, a Weslaco resident who has adopted 13 mustangs through the government program, the end result is a rewarding experience.

“If you take the time, they’ll turn out just as good (as horses born into domestication),” Frantz said. “They accept you a lot easier.”

Frantz said wild horses can sometimes be even faster to train than already domesticated animals, since they have not picked up any habits from their former owners.

“If someone trained them and didn’t do it properly, it’s a lot harder,” Frantz said. “(Wild horses) are like blank slates.”

BLM spokeswoman Theresa Herrera estimated the agency sold about 70 horses during an auction Friday, with the animals going for as much as $425. The event began Thursday with a preview of the horses offered.
Another adoption session is slated for Feb. 11-13 at the Guadalupe County Fairgrounds in Seguin.