BY CHRISTINE HAMILTON, FIELD EDITOR
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| Barbara Hoffer and her yearling stallion Not Kiddin Me. Teens on a shooting spree shot the horse's sire out in his pasture. |
Most folks associate John and Barbara Hoffer with their two-time world champion buckskin stallion Dun Beyond Reality, shown by trainer Mike McMillian of Gainesville, Texas.
Few remember the buckskin stallion they showed before the big horse: Buckleys Mr Twister, aka “Twister,” a 1998 stallion the Hoffers bred by CL Buckley and out of CL Millicent by Dan Dooley.
“He was the first buckskin we really started winning with,” Barbara recalled. They showed him to top-10 World Show finishes as a weanling and a yearling. Then they brought him out of retirement and showed him as an aged stallion, again with a top-10 World Show finish.
“That year, we decided to breed him (in 2003) and bred 3 mares, two of mine and one outside mare,” Hoffer said. “Right after we bred those mares, we found him dead in the pasture one morning.”
“He was killed by three teenagers, a 17-year-old and two 19-year-olds, in the process of killing about 10 horses in our area,” she continued. “They were just being mean. They got off with a misdemeanor.”
The tone of her voice tells you it’s not something you get over easily.
“It was a tragedy, and I couldn’t even talk about it for six months,” she added. “Finding my horse laying there dead. That horse lay out there in the rain. They killed him about midnight, shot him with a rifle; we found the rifle casing.”
At that point, the Hoffers didn’t know if any of the mares they bred were in foal, but the next year their Kid Clu mare, Not Kiddin, foaled a little buckskin colt.
“He was the first baby that was born,” Hoffer said. “And I wanted a buckskin stud colt because of Twister.” They named him Not Kiddin Me.
So far, the colt has won several International Buckskin Horse Association championships. They brought him to the World Show to show in the amateur and open yearling stallions classes.
Hoffer led him to a third-place trophy in the amateur, and they plan for him to show in the open with Aaron Hall.
“To me, he’s Twister’s legacy,” Hoffer said. “So, the barn name on this colt is Twister, too. We’ll carry on his legacy.”
