It is our mission inspire a sea of change in the way we, as a society, welcome our warriors home, and reduce the cost of military service on veterans and their families.

Our vision is to help veterans cope while changing the public perception of wild mustangs from tragic burden to highly valuable resource. It is fitting that descendants of the horses which carried our forefathers into battle will now help bring our warfighters home.

We value compassion and respect, diversity and inclusion, leadership and teamwork, empath and patience and building a supportive community.

Mustangs are under siege across the West. According to the Mustang Heritage Foundation, currently there are about 50,000 wild horses that have been rounded up from public lands and now languish in Bureau of Land Management (BLM) pens. Recently, an advisory board to the BLM recommended all horses be sold off or destroyed. They rejected the recommendation, for now, but the clock is ticking.

Mustangs are ideal for equine-assisted reintegration training. They are, in effect, highly sensitive 1,200-pound biofeedback mechanisms. Horses respond to a person’s intentions and physicality, mirroring subconscious issues so they may be identified and addressed with oneself.

Here at War Horse Creek, we have rescued several mustangs directly from the BLM, and will continue to do so as our program expands. 

Many mustangs that exist today were descended from horses bred for the military, and where then turned out when they were no longer needed. Only the strongest survived, due to their strength, resourcefulness and hyper-vigilance – characteristics they share with our veterans.

The War Horse Creek program utilizes “collaborative horsemanship” to teach veterans how to soften and slow down their reactions to new and difficult situations. The idea behind this type of horsemanship is to develop the skills necessary to better communicate with the horse, then transfer those skills to our daily lives. Horses are the modality used to soften and slow down reactions, to stop and think “How can I better communicate?” and “How can I better handle this situation?”

The Collaborative Horsemanship training model is very practical and accessible to veterans. Working with mustangs is active, challenging, and can only be successful if one earns the horse’s trust. Force or intimidation won’t work with a wild horse. To be successful, veterans must learn to control their emotional state, and practice patience, compassion, and kindness – characteristics that may have been dormant for a long time. Once they master these life skills with the horses, they can be transferred to other relationships.

War Horse Creek is located on 155 acres of land belonging to Living Free Animal Sanctuary at 54250 Keen Camp Road, Mountain Center, CA 92561. We recently launched a series of funding campaigns to expand our mustang facilities, which will allow us to adopt more mustangs and provide services to larger veteran groups.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Email: info@living-free.org

Call: (951) 659-4687