Les Vogt Biography

page 5 of 6 pages

My Dad started making silver bits and spurs in the 60's, and I eventually bought the company. I also designed protective leg boots for horses and have invented quite a few things to solve horse training problems that crop up. I've always collected horse equipment like women buy earrings, but just like training methods, it's not so much the equipment as the application that gets results. Nowadays, I've sold some of the businesses and concentrate on teaching clinics. From all my years riding, I give clinics to share my experience and to save people some of the mistakes and detours I took. Clinics are fun- even though I teach about thirty of them each year- because I get to travel and meet interesting people who I think sometimes teach me more than I teach them!

Teaching makes me ride better too. We used to think there was only one correct way to do things with horses, and now, the more I see the less I know. There's not such a gap between cow horses and jumpers or between reining and dressage- the horses don't care what they do. If we can teach a horse to go anywhere at any speed, with no apparent effort on the part of the rider and no more resistance from the horse than it takes to snap a single hair from his mane, we've achieved an ideal of horsemanship that I saw every day in the cowboys and horses that worked the California ranches. It made me shiver when I watched the Lippizanners in Vienna a few years ago and realized I was seeing the same harmony between horse and rider that I'd seen at brandings when I was a little boy.

I still ride for fun, but it's great to not have to ride a barn full of horses every day. Of course, there's always one special horse at any point in your life, and right now, I'm roping on Tux N Tails, my own horse. Tux has won a lot of reinings and is a multiple world champion cow horse, and all that education doesn't hurt him one bit as a heel horse. He and I just go play together now. If Tux felt just right, or if I found a young horse that was exciting, I might show again but right now I'm enjoying having a real life, not just a show schedule. There's a lot you miss by being at a show every weekend.

Tux is special because he's actually mine, not a client's horse, and because he's that proverbial 'gift horse' with a special story. In the early 80's I was riding a great mare called Commander Tucker, but she eventually went home to be a brood mare. I really liked her, and missed her when she left. Later that year, at the Red Bluff Maturity in June, my life-long friend Skip Brown invited me over to his ranch after the show. I found my way to his place, and was surprised to see a lot of people there that I knew. Then Skip blindfolded me, and I was pretty sure he was going to spin me into the swimming pool for a prank, because somebody'd discovered it was my birthday.

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