How to go
EagleRise Stables offers private horse riding lessons from beginners to experts at $35 an hour. They also offer week-long summer camps from June through August for $200. Contact Dawn Ivey at (513) 405-5518 for more information.
SPRINGBORO — The dense hooves of Sombra — a wild, dun-colored Kiger Mustang — pounds across the field of EagleRise Stables in Springboro, into the arms of his 6-year-old owner, Mckenna Ivey. The tattoo behind Sombra’s ear solidifies his birth in the wild.
“When we go to horse shows and people see his markings, they know Sombra’s a wild horse. Then I put this girl on him,” said Dawn Ivey, Mckenna’s mother and owner of EagleRise Stables.
“It causes quite the ruckus,” she said.
Sombra has been the ambassador of Kiger Mustangs since 2004 at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Ky. and won the National Reining Horse Association competition his first year.
Captured on a federally managed herd in 1999, Melissa Scott of Tennessee purchased him in 2000.
The next 10 years was spent in intense training.
Sombra can Spanish walk by lifting his legs in an upward and forward manner, piaffe, in place, in a rhythmic trot and can be ridden backwards — as long as you can find his buttons, which not everyone can.
Although six years older and much taller than his owner, “McKenna and Sombra just click,” said big sister Morgan Ivey.
Her mother attributes the pair’s more than 30 wins at various horse shows in the year she’s owned him to Sombra’s training and McKenna Ivey’s natural horsemanship.
Mckenna Ivey’s first horse was a 5-foot-tall Paint Horse, when she started competitions at age 3.
She didn’t ride a pony until this year, when she broke one to ride.
“God made her to ride a horse,” said Dawn Ivey.
Despite Sombra’s popularity, the Iveys — new to Kiger Mustangs — were unaware of Sombra’s popularity when Bill Smith of a Kiger Mustang horse farm in Lebanon offered him for sale last year.
After Sombra’s purchase, Dawn Ivey received a call from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — a federal agency that controls wild horse populations. The BLM asked Sombra to the Equine Affaire in Columbus to represent Kiger Mustangs in the largest all-breed horse show in the nation.
McKenna Ivey has her own reasons for liking him.
“He is fun to ride and has a cool canter,” said the home-schooled first-grader, who rides Sombra for a least an hour every day.
The Iveys own four other Kiger Mustangs, two of which Morgan Ivey, 16, shows in competitions. One is still too wild to ride.
“Kiger Mustangs seem to have sounder minds than other horses,” said Dawn Ivey.
“Sombra is rock solid; if you put him to do something, he’ll do it.”
While Sombra continues to be the breed representative of Kiger Mustangs, Dawn Ivey believes he’s happiest with Mckenna Ivey.
“He’s very content being a little girl’s show horse,” she said.
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