Valley Stars
“Training horses is a passion with me,” Dennis Schoonderwoerd tells me. “It’s what inspires me and drives me every day because it is so rewarding.” This tall, handsome gentleman is a very familiar face around the show rings. His students swear by him and have the awards to prove it.
“My dad was a dairyman in Riverside, California and broke his own ranch horses and when I showed an interest he arranged for me to take lessons from professionals,” he continues. “I grew up on the open circuit and I worked as a groom to pay for my training and pretty soon I was breaking Hunter-Jumpers, Tennessee Walking Horses, Saddlebreds etc. I’ve also driven Hackney ponies and English Pleasure horses, so my background is pretty versatile.”
Now this multi-talented horseman does just about everything in breed shows because his clients like to go for high-point. So he gives lessons of all types. Sometimes he ventures into Hunter under saddle and Hunter over fences, pleasure driving and English pleasure and equitation. “So, except for cattle events, in the Breed circuits I do all of it,” he assures me, “I guess I’d have to say that Paints and Quarter Horses are my specialty.”
Dennis has had special successes with the Western events helping his clients to earn a whopping six buckles in 2005 at the Fiesta Horse Show at Earl Warren Show Grounds. He says, “Western Horsemanship, and Showmanship in hand is very popular as are the Trail and Western pleasure classes. The English classes have plenty of entrees too.
Young Horses and Young Riders
Since we had heard that Dennis is very aware with working with a horse so it is safe for its rider, we asked him about this. “In dealing with amateur riders safe horses are very important!” he says. “Children have no fear until they have their first accident. But adults have a built in fear by now whether they have fallen off a bicycle or what. Show horses must be well broke and trained if only because this separates the winners from the losers. And it certainly adds a lot to the pleasure of riding.”
So how does a trainer prepare a young horse to be quiet and relatively fearless? Dennis has some interesting systems. “If I can imprint a young foal it’s going to make the training process at least 50% easier. It’s a de-sensitizing process and I would use that process with an unbroken two year old too. Horses are herd animals and their first instinct is to flee. So I want to get them to trust me as a human rather than flee. I want to expose them to things that they may come across in the future in a way that will take away the fear. The more exposure a horse gets, the safer they will be and the quieter they will be. So it’s all about exposure.
“My system is to work through twenty steps and I don’t go on until a horse accepts what we are doing. For instance, if a horse is afraid when I put the loop of a lariat over his head, I will repeat it a hundred times or whatever it takes for him to feel comfortable. When I’m working with a foal I’ll run my finger through its mouth maybe fifty times, because someday he’ll have a bit in there. I’ll slap the bottom of their hoof maybe fifty times which is like what they’ll experience with being fitted with a horse shoe. I handle their ears to prepare them for clippers. I work all over their body. I’m de-sensitizing them in this way.
Training Matured Horses
“With an older horse I use lariats, a long whip with a bag on the end, towels and grain sacks, getting them used to being handled and seeing that being touched by odd things is O.K.” Dennis continues. “Every time they move away, I pull them to me. I keep on until the horse submits, licks his lips and relaxes. I go all over the body and legs, over and over again until he stops moving away. This would be valuable if he would get caught in a fence or loose bailing wire because you would be able to cut him free with out a panic. You could avoid a possibly serious accident, because they know you’re going to save them. As I said, trail horses and show horses need to be calm so nothing surprises them.
Horse people have become more educated now and where they used to take a quirt and hit the horse between the ears to make him put his head down, now it done in non-cruel ways. We used to try to make a horse into something they really were not; now we do it with genetics…bloodlines. We can still get a horse to do something we want but if his bloodlines incline him to be talented in that particular thing, he’ll be better at it.”
“I have had many mentors but I have to say that Harold Farren helped me learn so much. Harold can really read a horse like almost nobody else and Monty Roberts has said this too. He’s phenomenal.
“Working with horses is so interesting because it’s an on-going learning process.” <<>>
Experiencing Horses to the Greatest Degree
If Dennis Schoonderwoerd is a trainer of many talents, Pat Cuddy is equally in love with experiencing horses to the greatest degree. Pat, who admits to being on this planet for sixty-eight years, is living proof that life can get better and better. After starting out riding Western, she had some exciting years of sailing over fences following the baying of the hounds while Fox Hunting. And she thoroughly enjoyed the discipline of English riding. Pat even explored Cross Country Competitive Driving and has tackled just about everything outside of becoming a jockey at Santa Anita.
This versatile lady had started taking lessons in 1994, with the ultimate goal of perhaps someday being able to compete in National Reined Cow Horse events. That adventure was zooming along and in 1999, Pat became the World Champion Limited Non-Pro rider in Reno, Nevada. Wow!
Then once again, that familiar yearning to learn something new electrified her consciousness. Anxious not to miss any thrill on horseback she decided to learn to ride Cutting Horses. This is, “The hardest of all equine disciplines,” she told me. “It’s difficult because in most other disciplines you have trained yourself and your horse but a lot still depends on your own skill. With Cutting Horses you are depending in your trained animal.”
Last year, she qualified for the World Finals. “Once you arrive at the World Finals there is a show within the show,” she tells me. “It is held in a very large heated arena and judged by five officials. You are automatically in the 1st go ‘round, then if your score is high enough you go into the 2nd go ‘round. Then the top fifteen go into the finals at the Finals. I qualified and then started competing in the classes with a clean slate.”
When the dust had settled, our own Pat Cuddy came out being thirteenth in the World of the 10K Amateur World Cutting Horse Finals. She rode her well named horse- GV Glory Boy. Did she have any secrets that helped her to succeed? “I wore my lucky shirt from Reno, in Amarillo and thirteen was my father’s lucky number and now it is mine. All the Cutting practices, the smiles, the tears, pushing my trainer’s patience to the limit (turning his hair grey), the show wins and the losses were quite a journey. I am proud to have traveled it, it was a lifetime high!”