Saving the mustangs

By Eric Smith

Sumee Chang has always had a special fascination with horses. The love goes back to growing up in Columbia, Mo., where family friends had them, and Chang would brave horrendous allergies to just be near the swift, powerful animals.

Unfortunately, those same allergies made the idea of owning horses of her own just a dream; the kind you only see in movies.

And it was a film that would beckon, later in life, to the 25-year Walt Disney Company veteran, turning a love for horses into a mission to save them.

“I just wasn’t aware of the story, I didn’t know what was happening with wild horses in this country.” Chang said of the film titled Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West. “I knew that there were some, somewhere, and I had no idea that it was such a tragic story.”

There are nearly 60,000 wild horses roaming the western United States, a figure nearly three time that which the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimates can be sustained for both horses and wild burros on public land.

According to the BLM, which was charged with maintaining and controlling wild horse populations in 1971, unmanaged wild horse herds can double in size every four years. Making matters more difficult is the lack of natural predators remaining in the areas they roam.

Instead of leaving the Mustangs, which are a specific type of wild horse that live within 10 specific western states, to die at the cruel hands of nature’s overpopulation consequences, or because of the stress and trauma of common herd management techniques. Chang is offering these spirits of the American west a chance to thrive with dignity by founding American Mustang Project (AMP) in 2024.

In founding AMP, Chang is combining both her calling to save these living embodiments of the American west and skills honed over a career at one of the foremost global storytelling brands ever, to do something about it.

“Disney is a massive global corporation that works in different industries, but it grows out of stories, whether you’re at a theme park or at a restaurant or watching a film, or even watching sports,” Chang said. “Whenever I see a horse, I think of its whole history, going back 500 years or even five minutes ago.”

AMP is based in Columbia and relies on mustang sponsorships from donors. A holiday fundraiser at Martin City at Saddle & Sirloin Club of KC was previously scheduled for Nov. 29, but has been postponed.

Rex, ‘The King,’ is AMP’s very first rescue from a Napa, Calif. auction in June 2024. The dark, seal-bay pony is “sort of our ambassador mustang,” according to Chang.

“He’s so personable,” she said. “He was gathered as a 4-month-old. It was a pretty rough and wild roundup. He was a little baby and separated from his mom, probably a little sooner than he should have been.”

Having been rescued by AMP, Rex now stands a healthy 16 hands (one hand = four inches) to the top of his ‘withers,’ the point between a horse’s shoulder blades where its height is measured. He’s tall for a mustang.

Chang says Rex’s ancestry has a part to play in this. The wild horses from the northern part of California and further up into the Pacific Northwest tend to be larger, due to the presence of genes that can be attributed back to both old cavalry mounts and some draft horses that were once essential to the logging industry in parts of the region.

Rex serves as living, breathing proof, not only of the good that can be done when humans intervene to protect animals when that can’t defend themselves, but of the history and the tangible connection he and the rest of his kin are to the very building blocks of how this country was built.

“These are some of the strongest, heartiest (animals). They are survivors…they live in families like people do. That’s part of their survival.” Chang said. “The mustang is a part of the Old West. These wild horses were in the lives of the pioneers, the cowboys, they were a part of that landscape.”

Chang’s project doesn’t only rescue wild horses from inhumane conditions with sponsorship levels of either $30 or $400 per month but even offers the path to owning one. AMP also offers either 30 or 60-day adoption and training packages where participants get to choose, bond, learn and go home with their very own mustang.

For more information visit americanmustangproject.org.