August 20, 2007

Norco trainer accepts mustangs' challenge

By LAURA RICO
The Press-Enterprise

NORCO - When Ray Ariss first set his eyes on the 3-year-old mustang, he couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed.

"It appeared a little bit lame," he said. "Aside from being a smaller horse, it didn't seem like he was sound."

Ariss and his family had just driven from their Norco home to the Palomino Valley Center in Reno, Nev., to pick up the mustang, one of 100 gathered from the Nevada hills by the Bureau of Land Management.

Ariss, 49, a longtime equestrian and trainer of Friesian and Andalusian horses, is one of the 100 U.S. horse trainers competing in the Extreme Mustang Makeover. The program challenged trainers from around the country each to tame one wild mustang and turn the animal into a suitable horse for ranch work and recreational riding.

Born out of a partnership among the BLM, the Mustang Heritage Foundation and the Nevada Wild Horse and Burro Commission, the Extreme Mustang Makeover will culminate in September in Fort Worth, Texas, where the trainers and their horses will gather to be judged on their success.

The trained mustangs then will be sold at auction.

Ariss admits it took some prodding from his wife, Pippa, to agree to accept the challenge. Ariss' dedication to the horse has involved marathon training sessions that often keep him up until 1 or 2 in the morning.

But Ariss is the first to say that the experience has been worth it.

"They are very special horses, not selectively bred by humans," he said. "They are bred through nature, by evolution."

Ariss' horse, named Hail Yeah after he was picked up during a Nevada hailstorm, can now obey commands and comfortably trot beside Ariss.

The once-jittery horse follows Ariss to cross a teeter-totter and walks over crushed plastic water bottles in a sandbox.

Hail Yeah's auction price will depend on how well he does in the competition, and Ariss hopes to bid on the horse himself.

"If he does really well, I'm going to have to pay out of the nose for him," he said.

Ariss traces his love of horses to his childhood and says he truly became "mentally sick" about horses after a family trip to Quito, Ecuador. The Los Angeles-based family eventually settled in the South American country, where horses were prevalent in daily life.

Ariss remembers being mesmerized by television Westerns and the "Hercules" series at a very young age, but not for the same reasons as most children. "It wasn't about the stars, it was the horses," he said.

He took to sketching pictures of horses in his notepads just to be able to look at them.

When Ariss was 15, his family moved back to California and settled in Cerritos. Ariss studied art at Cerritos College before transferring to Cal State Fullerton to study business and marketing.

He soon picked up jobs training horses and eventually found himself doing it for a living. Today, his home is on a ranch, where he operates the Starbrite Riding Academy.

After 20 years in Norco, he says he has found true happiness.

"Horses have everything to do with my luck and my happiness," he said.

Visit www.mustangheritage foundation.org to learn more about the Extreme Mustang Makeover.