By Nancy O’Neil Lombardo, Dir. of Horse Training
What distinguishes a mustang to most people is the freeze brand on the left side of his neck.
This brand is applied after a wild horse is rounded up and removed from public lands by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). A branding iron is supercooled using liquid nitrogen and held onto the shaved and prepped skin of the now formerly wild horse.
The brand is comprised of a large “U” indicating that the horse is now “federally-owned” and symbols that record estimated year of birth and capture location. These symbols can be decoded using the alpha-angle system of the BLM key code. Once decoded, the numbers can be entered into the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro website
Let’s test out our decoding skills on Brownie, a horse that MCR rescued last year from a Texas kill pen!
First, we shaved Brownie’s brand to make it more readable.
Then we can decode it using the BLM key code.
What we come up with is 93-19-72-24. The first two numbers represent Brownie’s estimated birth year: ‘93.
The last six numbers represent which state and herd management area Brownie came from.
The last four numbers would have also been on Brownie’s BLM generated neck tag while he was in holding.
And here’s what we come up with:
Brownie was rounded up from the Nevada Wild Horse Range on September 14, 1993. We can assume then that Brownie was just a foal when he was captured. We contacted the BLM and also discovered that he had been adopted out the following year by someone in El Cajon, California. Unfortunately, 25 years later he was dumped at an auction yard and picked up by kill buyers. Because of Brownie’s brand, we were able to recognize immediately that he was a mustang and intervened to rescue him — the day before he shipped to Mexico.
Photo by Kimerlee Curyl
