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Following a DREAM
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Steve Doherty talks about his journey into horsemanship and the road that led him there
stable lad? The answer is the start of a personal journey and one that is not over yet! Horses are the destination, the route and the direction along this life changing way. Growing up, horses played only a small part in my life. Although I had the odd ride as a boy, I loved all animals from an early age. As a three year old I dreamt of being a zookeeper just like Johnny Morris. Of course, like any boy growing up in the1960’s, exposure to westerns on the TV and films at the cinema meant dreams of being a cowboy. By the age of seven though, things had changed - it was the magic of photography that had taken hold and became a passion. My father Gerald was a keen amateur photographer and soon taught me the mysteries of how to develop and print photographs. Photography stayed with me, always there in the background, and, at the age of 19, I found myself a job as a trainee press photographer on a local weekly newspaper. My career as a photo journalist had begun. It was a career that took me from weeklies to dailies to Sunday papers and then to freelancing for quality national papers. I was seeing life through a camera, from the mundane to the dramatic, from the sad to the joyful.
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So what happened to change my life? Horses happened! Slowly horses
hy would a 47 year old press photographer go to work on a national hunt racing yard as a
led me down a different path. My wife Karen had ridden as a child and soon after meeting we started to ride together, going out on hacks and pub rides. A few years later we had two daughters and along came riding lessons and eventually ponies. As our daughters got older, bigger ponies arrived that we could also ride. It became a family hobby. We got into mountain and moorland ponies including a Dales mare, Swayfield Cilla Brown, who we started to show at County Show level. She was very successful and in 2000 qualified for the ridden M&M finals at Olympia. At this time the beginning of a different approach to working with horses had arrived in the UK championed by the likes of Monty Roberts and Pat Parelli. Karen was the one who started looking at these new methods and, to begin with, I was a little sceptical. However my opinion soon altered when we both began to see change in our horses. The next stage of my horse journey had now really begun and I started to read, study and take in as much information about these methods that some called ‘Natural Horsemanship.’
I went to clinics, met up with like minded people, watched demonstrations
(including one by the legendary Ray Hunt) and began to experiment with riding without saddle and bridle - an experience I found liberating and rewarding. The more trust I put in the horse, the more trust the horse gave me. To ride using thought and visualising the next moves in my mind was one the most important lessons of the journey so far. Visualisation and imagination are powerful tools indeed. Imagine and visualise good riding and what you want to achieve and it may just come true! A family holiday to the USA, which included staying on two ranches in Arizona, secured the idea that western riding was the way forward and on our return home we bought western tack for our ponies, another important step along my journey. As I spent more and more time riding and working horses on the ground, it became clear that to me that I wanted to do it all the time. This coincided with less work as a freelance press photographer due to the digital age and the decline of print media. I went to Oakridge Quarter Horses near Newark for a day to help out
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May/June 2012
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