Million dollar horses call for million dollar cowboy

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

By Jake Nichols

JACKSON HOLE, WYO. - On a spread of pristine Spring Gulch real estate, with the Tetons providing their awe-inspiring backdrop, a cowboy works a young dun in a round pen. The cowhorse slides to a stop and spins in place, reining masterfully. It’s a scene that has played out in the valley thousands of times over 100 years ... with a modern-day Jackson Hole twist.

This horse is worth more than half a million dollars and the cowboy is world champion cutting and reining horse trainer Al Dunning.

“I’ve trained horses my whole life, beginning as a little kid in 1962,” says Dunning from his office at Jackson Land & Cattle, his summer home. “I’ve had a lot of champions and stuff like that. Life’s been good.”

Real good. Dunning has owned and operated three ranches in Arizona where he winters. He has been an American Quarter Horse Association (AQHA) competition judge for 27 years and judged events for the National Reining Horse Association (NRHA) as well. His 1984 book, “Reining,” has sold close to 500,000 copies and been translated into nine languages.

So when Richard Fields – who bought the eventing center known as Spring Creek Ranch three years ago – wanted to learn how to cut cows, he looked for the best.
“Along came Mr. Fields, and he asked me if I would not only teach him how to cut but come up here to Jackson Hole and design a horse facility and initiate a horse program,” Dunning recalls. “Now we have acquired several really high-quality performance horses. He gave me the opportunity to pick out what I thought was the cream of the crop, so we have.”

Competitive reining is the cowboy’s dressage – a chance for a horseman and his mount to show off how fluid, smooth and light to the touch a horse will respond to his rider’s cues. The horse is under strict direction at all times.

By contrast, the cutting horse works with the reins hung loose, unused. Leg cues are provided, but the cutter works mainly off of instinct that horsemen refer to as “cow sense” or being “cowy.”

Like rodeo, the origin of cutting competitions can be traced to actual work on a cattle ranch. Dunning says some cowboys, on the most athletic horses, would “cut” out certain cows from a herd for branding or shipping. It was often quicker than roping and did not require the horseman to leave the saddle. Today’s competitions require cutting horse and rider to do much the same: single out one cow from a group using nothing but the horse’s tremendous lateral movement, stopping power and presence. For Dunning, the cutting horse is the cream of the crop. If one of his cutters craps out of the program he sells it to a roper or team penner.

In the highly competitive world of cutting horse competition, names like High Brow Cat, Smart Little Lena and Freckles Playboy come with impeccable pedigrees. They are proven winners from finely honed lineage – Babe Ruths and Mohammed Alis of their domain. Without a doubt, the most prized possession of any cutting horse facility would be a stallion that was virtually guaranteed to sire nothing but champions. There is such a stud. His name is Peptoboonsmal.

“One of my charges from Richard was to find a stallion to anchor our breeding program,” Dunning says. “I made some calls and set it up and we got Peptoboonsmal. It was one of the largest acquisitions ever in the cutting horse industry and probably the most prominent stallion ever to sell.”

Pepto’s father is Peppy San Badger, the Buster Welch-trained King Ranch stallion whose name is still whispered with reverence by every hand who has ever had the chance to throw a saddle on the back of any of his offspring. The seven-figure sale of Peptoboonsmal to Jackson Land & Cattle rocked the horse industry and put Jackson on the map as a place to be reckoned with along with the legendary Texas locales that dominate such equestrian events.

Peptoboonsmal will remain standing-at-stud at Carol Rose’s ranch in Gainesville, Texas, where he services up to 150 mares a year. Rose, incidentally, is the daughter of News & Guide icon Liz McCabe.

“Jackson Hole is not a very good breeding place, unfortunately, because of the weather,” Dunning admits. “Getting in and out of here is tough during the winter when people want to breed. Foaling and pasturing in the cold weather is almost impossible.”
Fields has now surrounded himself with quality horsemen like Dunning, ranch manager Rick Overstreet, and longtime Dunning hand Bret Barkemayer at his Western pleasure ranch. It is paying off already.

Dunning rode High Brow Cat mare Rio Gato to a fourth place finish in the world AQHA championship last year, scoring JLC’s first trophy. Barkemayer also won the go ‘round in the working cow horse category at the world show and placed fifth in the finals.

“We’re almost to the point where we’re going to win something really big in the reining,” Dunning says.

While no one would argue with Dunning’s pedigree as one of the top cutting and reining horse trainers of any generation, Dunning admits he can’t, or won’t, mold just any horse into shape.

“The cutting horses we train have to be bred impeccably because we don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “If you said to me, ‘I have a Percheron out of a Peruvian Paso and I think it’ll make a great cutting horse ’cuz it chases the dog well,’ I would not want to take it because nobody’s ever won on one of those.

We look for proven blood lines, mother and father, and we take proven conformation that looks like a champion. They have to be impeccably smart with the cow. They have to run hard, stop hard, turn square with the cow and have a lot of expression.”

The best begets the best training, says Dunning. After that, he admits, it’s sometimes guesswork on what’s inside the heart and mind of a million dollar horse. For Fields, stabling only the finest at Jackson Land & Cattle is fast becoming his hallmark.
Every summer morning, a Jackson cowboy puts his pony through the paces at the 2,000-acre ranch on Spring Creek Road.

He reins her like a top and she stops dead-still, splayed out, staring down a Corriente cow like a border collie holds sheep. Good work, Dunning says, patting the sweated neck of a cutting machine he hopes will do what it was born to do – win.

Photo by Neal Henderson
Al Dunning demonstrates how to cut a cow out of a herd.

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Million dollar horses call for million dollar cowboy | Planet JH News Article: Sports & Recreation

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