BY LARRI JO STARKEY, COPY EDITOR, AND CHRISTINE HAMILTON, FIELD EDITOR
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| Trudy Deming of Canyon, Texas, knows working with halter horses is simply in her blood. |
Some young girls cut out pictures from Tiger Beat to paste in notebooks. Trudy Deming clipped pages from The American Quarter Horse Journal.
And not just any pages – The little girl from Kelly, Iowa, had pictures of halter horses and their trainers, especially multiple world champion halter trainer Jerry Wells.
“I’d get the Journal and go through all the pages,” Trudy said. “My mom to this day still gives me a hard time because all those Journals that we had from the ‘70s are butchered because I cut out all the pictures of Jerry Wells in them.”
One Friday afternoon she got a phone call. The man said, “This is Jerry Wells.”
“I never said anything back,” Trudy said. “I just sat there and was like ‘Yeah, right’ and he says, ‘Well, I need some help, and your uncle told me that you were probably looking for something to do.’
“I said, ‘Let me call you back.’ So I called my mom and told her. I’m ecstatic. I can’t say a single sentence straight.”
At 21, Trudy was about to achieve her life’s dream. Her mother encouraged her to take the job, saying it would be an education money couldn’t buy.
“I called Jerry back, and I said, ‘I got to take care of some stuff Saturday here at the farm, and I’ll be down Sunday.’”
Trudy grew up showing halter in AQHYA and 4-H, and learned how to do it on a limited budget. Her mother, Sindy Twedt, and uncle, James Duncan, are both longtime Quarter Horse breeders.
From Jerry, Trudy learned the secrets of his halter success: patience, oats and alfalfa.
“Jerry always had me breaking the weanlings to stand because I have lots of patience,” Trudy said. “I can stand in there and take my time.”
For fitting a horse to show, Trudy learned that the basic food groups are the best.
“I see a lot of people anymore that are feeding (horses) this and getting them this and getting them that, and we never really did any of that,” she said. “It was just some oats and alfalfa, and he still could fit them up and feed them just as good as everybody else.”
Trudy has learned from many people in the halter industry, she said. While here at the World Show, Trudy has been studying the methods of the best in the world.
“I learn a lot from observation,” she said, “so I sit and watch and just kind of see what they do … and then formulate my own plan of attack.”
Working at a halter barn also opened Trudy’s eyes to the possibilities of the horse world. Becoming a halter trainer is still high on her list of choices, but the 25-year-old also has considered working at a stallion station or in a veterinary clinic.
For now, she’s concentrating on an animal science degree at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas.
