Hi!

Now that you're here, I can explain a little about how we consistenlty produce the type of horses you'll find for sale on our place.  First of all, we both have full time jobs as veterinarians, not as horse trainers.  Raising, training and showing horses is what we do for recreation.  Because it is a hobby, we're not under any time constraints and we take our time.  Although it may take us longer to reach the destination, we truly enjoy the journey along the way.  This works for us, and we've never heard any complaints from the horses, either!

Now that we're out of the breeding business for ourselves and our youngest home raised colt is now a 2y/o, I guess I don't have to go into how we'd handle foals lol! 

As of 2008, we started switching our focus to finding a few good young geldings to bring along.  Frankly, neither one of us is very patient when it comes to waiting for the babies to grow up.  There are so many high-end horses out there now to choose from we decided it made more sense for us to go 'shopping'.  Temperament will still be our priority, but now there will be no gambling anymore as to color and gender!  Additionally, we are looking forward to working with some different bloodlines than what we have had in the past.

If we get a colt that's not already started, we'll send him to Sam Hudson of Hector, Ar.  He has a lifetime's experience training, and does a great job. They'll get at least 30 days with Sam.  They'll stay there until he has them guiding easily, giving to the bit and leg, performing all three basic gaits (walk, trot, lope), and stopping and backing when asked. 

Once back home, most of them will get a vacation lasting anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months.  When we start back in, they'll be refreshed physically and mentally and ready to go on.  From there, it's just a matter of putting the time and exposure in on them in a slow, easy fashion.  They don't get hammered on, we don't have enough time to overwork or overshow one anyway, but the low stress outings and training sessions they do get make a tremendous difference a year down the road!

As you can see from the pictures, there's not much our horses don't get exposed to.  We try to do quite a bit of trail riding, ground work with ropes and balls and sacks and such, and a little ranch work.  This is my favorite 'phase' of training, and gives me the biggest sense of achievement when working with our horses.  I truly appreciate hearing people comment on how well-behaved one of our horses is.... but that doesn't hold a candle to how good I feel when I see him tolerating and handling a potentially bad situation and knowing it's because of the time and patience that was put into him on our part.  This is where having three cooperative boys comes in handy.  They're always willing to do their part in helping get the horses used to just about any kid-related activity you can think of - and some you probably don't.

Once a horse is ready (even if we know he's not aimed toward a roping career) we'll start him on the basics.  This includes tracking the donkey/lead steer and dry work tracking the dummy.  They may track for weeks or even months on and off before ever having a steer roped off them out of the box.  They'll have gotten plenty of scoring along the way, and learn to deal with the noise and excitement of gates and chutes and horses and steers coming out.  Eventually, we'll get our easiest steers up and start them coming out of the box.  Once a horse has gotten fairly consistent scoring, rating, closing and stopping we'll move up to medium cattle.  At this point, they'll start getting hauled to local practice pens for variety, until they're ready to jackpot. 

Not every horse is going to have the talent or desire to make a rope horse you can go win on, but they WILL know how to handle themselves on the end of a rope - and not all roping is done in a pen........