Stacey Sample Showhorses

08/02/2025

Raising a World Champion is … FUN!! EL KABOOM !
By El Ante out of Sucha Super Secret.

03/05/2023

05/30/2020

So much to be thankful for ❤️

05/02/2018

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HORSE WHISPERER. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you will learn, if you pay close attention, is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. You need to practice only three things, patience, observation and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man who died Tuesday (July 20, 1999) in California, a man named Bill Dorrance.

Dorrance was 93, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe, as most people do, that you are superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode, or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero -- the Spanish cowboy of 18th-century California -- he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.

There is no codifying what Bill Dorrance knew. Some of it, like how to braid a rawhide lariat, is relatively easy to teach, and some of it, thanks to the individuality of horses and humans, cannot be taught at all, only learned. His legacy is exceedingly complex and, in a sense, self-annulling. It is an internal legacy. The more a horseman says he has learned from Dorrance the less likely he is to have learned anything at all.

That sounds oblique, but it reflects the fact that what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but that extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle and people. If you learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.

There is no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship with horses. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity. It is hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.

From an article by Verlyn Klinkenborg 'Death of a Legendary Horseman' - NY Times July 24, 1999 - http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/24/opinion/editorial-notebook-death-of-a-legendary-horseman.html

Image of Bill is by Steven and Leslie Dorrance - http://www.billdorrance.com/about.htm

01/16/2018

THE GREATEST SECRET and Stacey Sample Show Horses welcomes TOLD YA MY SECRET... AQHA, PHBA and APHA, 2015 Stallion

08/02/2017

01/11/2017

Gorgeous 2yr old filly...NN For Sale due to owner's illness. She is AQHA and PHBA... Shown very little but has done well. In the show barn and ready to go!! Contact me for any info needed

01/11/2017

For Sale due to owner's illness. 2016 NN ~ AQHA, APHA PHBA c**t by Yella By Design out of Res World Champion mare! He is in the show barn being fit on... contact me for any info

07/31/2016

Couldn't be happier with with the transformation Uno ( A Genuine Gold Dude ) has made since coming back to Texas in April ! Love having his happy face around!!