2013 Lincoln County Cowboy Symposium

My wife and I recently returned from our 13th trip to the annual Lincoln County Cowboy Symposium in Ruidoso, New Mexico. Ruidoso is a mountain town about an hour Northeast of Alamogordo, New Mexico and located close to the Mescalero Apache Reservation. It's nice to get up into the Mountains and get a taste of cold mornings after a long hot summer.

We go as it's our anniversary and we were also celebrating my wife completing cancer treatment and literally getting back in the saddle. As you can tell from the photo, my wife is beautiful, and more important, healthy,....... and really likes Kettlecorn! 

The Symposium is a two and a half day gathering of horse people, western artists and vendors, horse events - reining competition, horse training and mule demonstrations, and the headline Chuck wagon cook off. The big draw for us has always been Craig Cameron's demonstrations where Craig works with any troubled or green horse that is brought to him.  The Craig Cameron booth offering high quality working gear, from halters, to hobbles, to bridles, bits and books, and saddles was jam packed as usual.  All of the gear is available at the Craig Cameron website, too.

With one of the horses brought to Craig this year it was a 2 year old filly that was barely halter broke,..if you consider halter broke to be just wearing a halter and not leading up, facing or giving to pressure.

Craig said up front that he was going to try and make this filly better off but it might take longer than the scheduled hour demonstration time since it was going to be up to the filly to be accepting and he wasn't going to rush her. Craig reminded us that his objective is to take the fear out of the horse.  He reminded us that if this filly was handled more since birth she would have been in a better place to begin with this morning.

He started with getting her to move her feet, disengage her back end when asked, giving to pressure, facing up on the lead line and desensitizing her with a rope and flag.  You could see the changes in the horse come and soon Craig had this filly wearing a bare back pad. While she continuously got better, she still had a little trouble being driven or moved around the round pen, so Craig brought in his big gray horse to help and give the filly someone to follow.



Once she got comfortable moving around the pen with the big Gray, Craig got her saddled and did the same. After a few spurts of bucking, see photo at left, she settled down nicely.

Through what turned out to be about a 90 minute session Craig gave the fily short breaks which calmed the young horse and gave her a chance to absorb and accept was Craig was asking of her.





Craig also worked the filly from horseback atop his big Gray giving the filly a chance to accept a person towering above her and used the Gray to get the filly to follow the feel on the lead rope, getting some lateral flexion, moving her feet and disengaging her back end. See photo at right.





At the end of the session the filly was ridden in the round pen by one of Craig's apprentices. That session changed that horse's life for the better. You could see it in her as she changed in the round pen and when she left the pen she was leading up just fine. A lot of fear went out of that young horse that morning as she began to trust humans.  I hope she never gets let down.