ACTHA ride host Kelly Chapman always wanted to be a horse trainer. She was born in Wyoming and moved to Colorado at age 16, where she began to live that dream. Her first two horses were two unbroke ponies. With no one around to teach her, she led one of her horses away from the house, got on, and he walked home. Forty years ago we didn’t have professionals or clinicians around to show us the way, so Kelly gathered her knowledge from the television. She learned from the TV there were two schools of thought, the cowboy way and the Indian way. The cowboys broke their horses by jumping on and bucking them out. The Indians broke their horses by talking to them and gentling them before getting on. Since all Kelly had to rely on was the TV she decided the best method was the Indian way, so she modeled her training after them.
Lacking formal riding instruction, Kelly never learned to ride a bucking horse or for that matter, learned to fall, and any helmets that existed were more for show than protection. Over the years of training a couple hundred horses, Kelly has suffered more than twenty concussions with numerous trips to the hospital. Continuing to work as a trainer she has stopped taking so many chances. As Kelly says, “I just don’t get up as well as I once did. I still train horses but on a much smaller scale and only to repeat customers. I now call myself a fair weather trainer and don’t get in a big hurry. But that’s not really what I am; the years of experience have taught me many things."
"My clients know they will get what they want, but I don’t train a thirty day horse. I don’t like the pressure and neither does the horse.”
ACTHA Ride Host Kelly Chapman