The story of the Mustang, Jazz, is a love story…it didn’t start out that way.

As #7244, he was a mud-caked wild Mustang, never touched by human hands. There were 56 wild Mustangs in Ewing, IL, a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holding area, waiting to be claimed by horse trainers who paid a fee to compete in the 2008 Midwest Mustang Challenge, Madison, WI.

The horse trainer would risk it all, publicly. She or he would gentle the wild Mustang, train him and then return to showcase their horsemanship and partnership skills together, in front of a sold out crowd, in a loud arena…in 90 days.

The goal of the Midwest Mustang Challenge was to have top trainers from around the country participate in that public way, to train the wild Mustangs, show them in a competition, and then auction them off for adoption to support funding for Mustangs for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

In a pen of wild Mustangs, all with numbers on them…Suzanne Myers, M.S., Ph.D., founder of Next Level Horsemanship™, drew #7244. She named him Jazz.

“Training a wild Mustang peaked my interest,â€