By the time I got into High School, I was pretty discouraged about the whole Rodeo thing. My mom bought me a nice barrel horse and I made it to exactly two rodeos on him. I won the first one and failed miserably at the second one. Being relatively poor, we couldn't afford to haul to a lot of rodeos anyway, but only getting to go to a couple of them a year didn't give me much of a chance to get any better. Since my mom was(and IS) fanatical about limiting the number of practice runs a person makes at home, I just didn't see getting any better. So I started focusing on the horse show end of it. A lot of that probably had to do with my dad's latest wife at the time. He married a woman who had some extremely high dollar and World Champion horses. No Shit...he found a woman in the bar and she actually had some of the nicest horses I had ever seen up to that point. Unfortunately, the joke became, she was looking for a cowboy with land and money and my dad thought he had found a woman with good horses and money. Well, dad had land and she had good horses, neither of them had a dime. Guess you can imagine what happened to her horses over time...the good ones got old and died and the offspring were never as good as what she started with. Mostly due to my dad's random breeding efforts. He thought all the colts were good enough to be studs and all the fillies were good enough to breed. It was a sad end to a fine breeding program, but I was lucky enough to end up with my old mare before everything was dispersed.
I did catch the horse show bug though and decided that was my future. I knew that I always wanted a good barrel horse...
But, I never really ever wanted to train barrel horses for the public. Barrel horses are soooo personal. Once most of them hit their finishing stages, they just can't be passed around. Besides, who wants to get rid of a winner?At first I was focused on Western Pleasure horse. That is what I went to college to learn how to train...
A nice Western Pleasure horse has always appealed to me. I love a perfect, tiny little jog and a slow, cadenced lope. Then at college, I started to realize what it took to train a horse to do these things. I heard the horror stories of heads tied up for hours and causing anemia and got familiar with gadgets like running martingales and draw reins. Sheez-this wasn't what I signed up for. I did have to spend my intern working for a WP snaffle bit futurity trainer. They didn't do any of the nasty stuff I had heard about, but I was bored out of my mind. Not one single time in 3 months, was I allowed to just get on one of the prospects and just "go ride". They didn't want these colts to know anything except, go slow with the head low! Yea, for a girl who grew up on a ranch, where you needed to cover ground sometimes and rode in speed events-it was torture. They asked me to stay at the end of my internship, but I couldn't get out of there fast enough.I figured I wanted to try my hand at reining horses...
Certainly that had to be more fun than WP horses. Yea, I'm sure it would have been, if I could have found a place where the head trainer actually wanted to teach a person anything. Of course, I managed to pick up a few things as I bopped around the country, sometimes working in the horse world and sometimes not. It was always funny though how my non-horse jobs usually led me to my next horse job.My biggest problem with trying to get to the next level of training horses was that I was really good with colts. The people I worked for, loved the handle I could put on a prospect in the first thirty days. My colts were just quiet, soft and pretty broke. The boss trainer could jump on them and finish them out with no problem. Of course you knew they weren't really going to spend the time teaching me how to finish one out. Believe me, I tried to figure out what they were doing to get to the next level.
The last professional barn I worked for had Halter, WP prospects, Reining horses and Cutters...
I was pretty excited. The owner was a crotchety old bastard, but he knew his stuff. I was really hoping to get to ride a "finished" reining horse and a "finished" cutting horse. Guess what? I never got to step on a single thing except for the prospects and the problem horses that came through the barn. Over and over, I heard...this horse's owner bought this one for a pleasure futurity prospect, this is a reining prospect, this is a cutting prospect. Never once did I hear...the owner wants to see what this one will be good at. From that time period some of the most notable horses stick in my brain; the tiny little pleasure prospect with perfect gaits, that really, really would have been much better off being turned out for year to grow up and then made into a top notch reining horse. That sweet little filly was a reining trainer's dream, natural flying lead changes, a deep, deep stop and a long sweeping lope. It was blowing her mind to have to slow down, she hated it. I hated it for her. The 2y/o that the owners hated because he had coliced as a yearling and when they tubed him, his windpipe was damaged. He was a sweet thing, but panicked if he loped very much-he just couldn't get his air. They blamed the horse because he would never be the futurity prospect they bred for. The ultra sweet and kind sorrel horse, who would do anything for you. He was horribly bench kneed and I told his owner that if he just took it very easy on him until he matured he would probably stay sound-he took him home and because he was sweet and kind-rode the crap out of him and wrecked his knees. The rank, nasty chestnut horse that would purposely run you into a fence or wall. The owner lied and said that the horse hadn't broke his leg by doing this. I spent hours and hours riding that horse up and down roads and in the corn field. He was a POS-but the owner insisted he be ready to go to a rope horse trainer in 60 days. I bet he didn't last 30 days before he was flipping over in the box. No mind on that horse what-so-ever, the owner knew it, the horse had broke his leg, but had no qualms about sending him to us(me) to "fix".By the time I was done with working at that place, I was done with training horses professionally. I hated horsepeople and I hated the horse show world. I never wanted to ride anything but my own horses ever again. But I missed it after a few years and started taking in a few horses again. At least this time, if the owner wanted something unrealistic I could tell them to come get their horse.
But now? Now I am getting the urge to train again. When I was in Colorado, I saw an ad for a reining horse barn looking for an assistant trainer. It has me thinking a lot about getting back into showing more seriously. Winning and placing at the local shows is fun, but really I can do that on a horse I yank out of the pasture and clip up. I want bigger and better. I am back to wanting to go to the next level. At almost 40 years old, I think I am finally mature enough to handle the pressure. It isn't something I could do in the next year, but what do you guys think...is 40 years old, too old to get back in the game? Will anything I have learned over the past 39 years of being around horses still be effective enough to make it in the big-time? I don't want to hang my own shingle out, I'd much rather work with or for someone who is already training and showing.
