Valley Riders Cut a Wide Swath Here and in Australia

Please don’t read this article if you know everything there is to know about Cutting Horses. On the other hand, it’ll be a fun read and you’ll share in some heart-pounding moments with some of our local riders. You’ll read about horses and cows blowing up, hot quits, deep cuts, shooters and dying in the herd among other scintillating bits of information.

Mount Up! Here We Go!

A Cutting horse is one that has been developed through superior breeding and careful training for the ability to separate one cow from a whole herd of cattle.

These smart horses will actually squat down and look a cow in the eye to see which way they are thinking of going! The horse sits back on its rear end and moves back and forth with front legs extended-this is called a sweep.

A good Cutting horse is supposed to be a mirror image of every move a cow makes. They’re usually Quarter Horses, because those horses are noted for their talents in ranch work.

It is believed that this sport started with the early Vaqueros when they were working cattle on the big ranches. Of course, you know that this is the Valley of the Vaquero, so it’s no wonder that Cutting competitions are getting hotter by the minute. Our own Equestrian Center has put in a whole new arena for all cow horse events. The ribbon cutting will be on May 19th and 20th featuring the SYV Super Cow Horse competitions.

Here’s some ammunition so you can talk your way through a show: A horse that’s “cow smart” seems to know what a cow is going to do, before the cow does. Horses or cattle are said to “blow up” if for some reason they panic. You’d have a “hot quit” if you quit working a cow before it has turned away from the herd or come to a dead stop. Each Cutter is required to ride in the center of the herd, at least once and cut a cow out. This is a “deep cut.” Nobody likes a “shooter”, which is a cow that for no apparent reason bolts from the herd and interferes with a performance; and you “die in the herd” if the timer buzzer goes off before you can get your cow out.

Local Accomplished Riders in our horse community has some very accomplished Cutting Horse riders and there were big celebrations when Terry and Stephanie Larrabee brought the $3,000 Novice World Cutting Horse title to the Santa Ynez Valley, in February of this year. They were the first couple ever to win that title.

They were the first couple ever to win that title. It came about because Terry had several painful injuries part way through the year, and Stephanie, being co-owner, was able to step in and continue the quest for a World Title with their beautiful eleven-year-old Quarter horse mare Doc’s Tee Boots. The title is based on the total moneys earned by a talented horse and the Larrabees came home with a total of $55,000 plus other valuable prizes. Terry also won the PCCHA $3,000 and the $10,000 Non-Pro Championship for the Western states. When Boots was a three-year-old, she had won a Futurity in Australia but had done little since then. Terry bought her here in America when she was eleven and started on the trail to glory. The Larrabees competed in five different states during the year and traveled over 22,000 miles and even survived dive bombing mosquito attacks. Their work ethic is amazing and they earned every penny, the hard way.

A Perfect Match

“It was a perfect match from the start,” said Terry. “This horse was born on October 14th, so we have the same birthday. This is the greatest horse I have ever been around in my life. This mare loves me and I love her. In fact, Stephanie says that it’s a good thing that Tee Boots has four legs, cause if she had two legs, Steph would be single.”

Before a competition Terry gets up at four o’clock in the morning and feeds his horse, even though he may not be showing until eleven. “She likes to eat breakfast and then sleep for a couple of hours,” confides Terry. “I just sit outside her stall and have a cup of coffee and wait for her to wake up. Then I go in and tell her, ‘Boots, come on girl it’s time to get dressed; we’re gonna go in and chase some cows’ and she’s as calm and happy as can be. We go out and lope a bit and then we go in and try our luck.”

In a 21/2 minute period a rider will cut two or three cows from a herd of about 30. There are two helpers on horseback in the ring: a turn back rider and a herd holder and they gather the herd. A rider is hoping to find a fresh cow on the edge, because a cow that has already been cut may not be as responsive to the horse and rider. Sometimes riders ask the helpers what cows are fresh. With all the thrills of such a big win, one wonders just what sticks in Terry’s mind as his best moment.

He answers without hesitation, “At West World Show at Scottsdale, which was my very first show, when I put my hand down on her neck to start the class, she just ate the cow up! I said-Wow! I really have something here and it just got better and better. I noticed judges from other arenas would come over and watch her work. She was just phenomenal.”

This star-crossed couple originally met at Dwight Stewart’s training stable when Terry switched from riding snaffle bit to Cutting horses. Stephanie is an expert rider herself and last year won the Pacific Coast Cutting Horse Non-Pro Futurity Championship, riding her horse Soul of a Star. It was a year they’ll never forget.

Cutting in Australia

In 2001 Kathy Hauenstein was a part of the US-Australia Cutting Horse Challenge and went over with the American team of twelve. “They furnished horses for us and it was so much fun that I have gone back to almost every Australian Futurity since then,” Kathy tells me.

“I finally decided that I really wanted to have my own horse in it. So I bought a three-year-old Australian mare named Playing with Roses from Graham Amos who is kind of the “Grand Old Man” of Australian Cutting. He has trained all the hotshot Australians that have come over and dominated American Cutting in Texas and he will continue to train her.”

This dynamic damsel has been told by old timers that she is probably the only American non-pro ever to come to Australia to show a Cutting horse. Kathy recently returned from a two-week visit with her Australian mare that she calls Rosie and was able to ride her every day.

“There were two Cuttings in the “bush” which is Australian for out in the country,” she goes on to say. “The competition in Chinchilla had a wild and wooly Melon Festival taking place. There were crazy contests like the “head bashing contest," which involves two men on either side of a watermelon trying to crush it with their heads.

Then there was the “watermelon slide” where people leaped into a pile of watermelons and slid down a hill (none of the Cutters that I knew, did this).

“For this particular Cutting there was no formal arena, just an old cattle pen. People warmed up their horses out in a grove of Eucalyptus trees. The events there are not as sophisticated as they are here. But maybe they’re more fun, cause it’s just more kind of down home and close to the roots of the sport.

The second cutting that I attended was at a big show grounds at Toowoomba and I’ll go back there to compete in a Futurity this July. It was Rosie’s first trip to town so she was quite excited about taking everything in like trash cans and flapping tents. There was lots of commotion but she learned fast and once in the ring, she really knew how to handle a cow.”

Same Rules with Entertaining Differences

It’s fun to hear about how people in distant lands do things differently and Kathy had warmed to her subject.

“The Cutting Association in Australia has 900 members and the NCHA in America has about 20,000. They have the same rules so it’s the same yet it’s a little bit different. It’s very jolly and they all call each other ‘mate’, and are really good riders. Some of the cowboys have a rougher, more of an outback look, and their hats have a certain slouch. When you walk in, you can definitely tell you’re not in Fort Worth!”

Australian beef is grass fed so there are no feedlots; the beef is from three or four-year-old cattle. The present drought has made it necessary to feed them in the “long yards” which is actually just grazing the grass along the sides of the roads. So as one is driving along and there will be six or seven hundred head of cattle grazing, with lots of herding dogs taking care of them.

“The Australians can just do about anything for their horses,” Kathy concludes. “They live so far out there that nobody’s going to come maybe 1,500 miles out in the bush to help them. So they shoe their own horses and take care of medical problems because they have to. Over there they travel huge distances to come to the Cuttings. I met a man who was in the World Finals like the Larrabees just won, and the for last show he couldn’t get there by truck and trailer because the rivers were in flood stage so he just rode his horse for sixteen miles and swam these two rivers to the next Cutting. He won that Cutting and rode and swam back home again. And there are crocodiles in those rivers!