Gracious & Always Looking Forward – Pasley Puthoff

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188 – May, 2016

By Megan Arszman

A little girl with a blond ponytail is busily working with her pony while watching her parents ride a pair of young horses. Mom turns the colt left; the little girl turns her pony left. Dad stops and backs up his colt; the little girl does the same with her pony. This continues for another 30 minutes or so, until the schooling session is complete. Pats on the necks of the colts and a hug around the neck of the patient pony… it’s the beginning of a future, stellar training career.

A Trainer from the Beginning

Pasley Puthoff feels privileged that she grew up with parents who were trainers. Every spare minute she had was spent at the barn riding horses, cleaning stalls, or just hanging out. She got her first pony, Libby, at age two, which only solidified her obsession. “All I knew was being in the barn,” Pasley says. “Even when I started going to school, I would come home and go straight to the barn. I’ve just always adored horses and the barn has been the only place I’ve wanted to be.”

Her father, Tim, always knew Pasley had a special connection with the horses she rode. He recalls, “They would do a lot more for her than they would for her mother Lynne or me. I don’t know what it was, but they just worked for her.” One of Tim’s favorite memories of Pasley happened when he was riding a troubled three-year-old for a customer and five-year-old Pasley was riding around on her walktrot horse. The young horse Tim was riding started to buck. Before Tim could pull him out of it, the rein snapped and he was thrown. Pasley calmly dismounted from her pony and grabbed up the loose horse as Tim got back on his feet. “She threw her hands in the air and said, ‘that’s it; this horse isn’t going to work. It needs to find a new home.’ It always seemed like she understood horses and knew that you couldn’t make a horse do what he didn’t want to do,” he says.

Pasley’s saint of a pony saw many afternoons being tied around with baling twine or being vacuumed in the crossties. Even the family dog wasn’t immune to Pasley practicing her training techniques. “I will never forget looking out towards the barn and seeing Pasley putting a halter on her yellow lab and having him pull her little brother around in the snow in a toboggan,” Lynne, Pasley’s mom, fondly remembers.

Pasley attended public school through sixth grade and participated on the swimming and basketball teams, but she always knew her heart was at the barn with her horses. “If there was a conflict between a game or swim meet and a horse show, there was no option in my mind—it was the horse show every time,” she says. “That didn’t always work though, because coaches want you to be committed to the team more than horses.” Therefore, Pasley started homeschooling.

Click here to read the complete article
188 – May, 2016