Joe Camp, film writer, producer, director, author, passionate speaker, and the man behind the canine superstar Benji believes that anything is possible if you work hard enough and trust in yourself. He was told by industry “experts” not to bother with the original Benji film; that it wouldn’t work. He proved the experts wrong and now, after five Benji movies, he’s at it again with his new best selling book The Soul of a Horse published by the Crown/Harmony imprint of Random House in 2008. A book that is already in its fourth printing, has climbed to #4 on The Dallas Morning News Non-Fiction Best Seller List, and is setting traditional thinking about horses on its ear.
Learn more about Joe and Kathleen Camp on their website: Soul of a Horse
Joe
ACTHA Monthly | September 2015 | 41
horse and I would be asking everywhere I went how do I make his life better. Not how do I make my life better. My life would get better when his did.
And with that perspective it soon became very clear that there were things in his life that needed to get better. If what I was being told did not appear to be in the best interest of this horse who had trusted me and chosen me then I was not going to listen to someone else telling me what I needed to be doing to my horse that I loved and he didn’t even know. I would get the answers myself. The true answers. Because I now had the passion to drive me through the barriers. And to withstand the onslaught from those who did not care about their horses as much as I did.
If what I was being told did not appear to be in the best interest of this horse, then I was not going to listen.
I rejected their lists. All those things you are supposed to do when you find yourself owning a horse. Or six. And Kathleen and I set out to find the real answers for ourselves.
Now that we have eight horses living happy, healthy, stress free lives with none of the traditional problems and issues of so many horses living a more traditional life, what do you suppose has happened? Barely a day passes that someone doesn’t ask if I have a list of everything we’ve done in order to obtain the results we have.
A list. I can’t believe it. A list.
If you don’t have passion for what you’re doing, for your horse, no list will make even the slightest difference in your success. If you don’t care enough about your horse to passionately want the very best life in the world for him or her, then none of what I’ve written before, or here, will make any difference whatsoever. To you or your horse.
This article has been abbreviated from Joe's original due to space. To read Joe's complete article, click here >