DEAN TUFTIN INTERVIEW

Q - Why did you start DT Horses and what was the plan and the goals?

A - When I rodeoed professionally, I saw the need to raise the right kind of horses that were real top end Rodeo horses. That’s when I started my focus on Team Roping horses, and that is what I specialized in. As I was rodeoing, I would be in common areas of the Country and sometimes look for horses, or try horses for myself, my partner, and friends. Nine times out of ten the horses were not the quality that we were looking for. They weren’t broke good enough, sometimes they had been roped on and they were good rope horses, but they didn’t have steering or brakes. So, people would rope on them and they ended up as rope horses because they were rejects from reining, cow horse, cutters and sometimes off the ranch. More often the ones that were successful were the ones where somebody spent some time getting them really broke. You could just feel it in the horse. So, my focus was to create a program, raise my own horses that I thought were true athletes and were not rejects.

We have a process where we start them and get them super broke, we took our time, and we did all the right things to give the horse the best opportunity to be successful. That is really how we started. That was back in the early 2000’s. I started the business with my Mother-in-Law. She had a barrel racing horse that went to the National Finals. So, my job right off the get-go was to try and find matching mares for that stallion. And we did, but by year two he had broken his leg.

At that point we were stuck without a stallion and we had all these mares. We fast forward it a little bit and bred the mares around, then bought the first couple of stallions and within a few years we started to win some AQHA World Championships in roping. It was pretty fast! We found kind of a magic combination in what we were doing. The type of stallion I found was key. I found him through Carol Rose and my mares that I was breeding. I think we have 10 or 12 AQHA Championships now. Horses that were mostly grown & trained 100% on my ranch. We have had three PRCA/AQHA Horses of the Year, three runner-up Superhorses at the AQHA, we have had two Senior All-Around in the AQHA.

The AQHA World people know who we are, but in Scottsdale Arizona they know us for roping. We expanded that with the addition of Hickory Holly Time. We started breeding him and we also started adding the cowhorse operation to the roping operation. That was around 2011, and we had our first finalist in the Snaffle Bit around 2011. So that has been going on about a decade now. We have won several runner-up’s, we won the World’s Greatest Horseman, we have been Reserve Champion at the Derby, at the Snaffle Bit. We have definitely put our stamp on the Quarter Horse industry with our horses. To make a long story short, we went from a mom and pa operation where I was riding the horses and training them, into several trainers. We have upwards of about 130 horses right now. We have half of the operation, all of the horses in training, here in Scottsdale and all of the mares, babies and stallions are in Weatherford Texas. Our operation is really big right now, with everything from a twoyear-old trained, on up, right here in Scottsdale. We breed about 25 to 30 babies a year at our peak. Being a roper and trainer myself, I really did not have any deadlines on the horses. I would train them until I saw fit. The first few we shipped off were very, very successful.

Q -- Bret Paulick on Illbeyourhickleberry, out of your stallion Hickory Holly Time won the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity Non-Pro in 2020. How did that make you feel?

A - Last year was very exciting for us at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Not only was Bret’s success huge for us, but we had five Hickory Holly Time’s in the Top 25 in the Open Finals. So out of 300 horse, five of the Top 25 were from our stallion. In the year previous it was his first group of colts. The first year we won it but lost in a tie breaker on the fence. We had a six-point lead going into the fence work. It has been a couple of really exciting years with his babies, and we are looking forward to more of that success going forward.

Q - Hickory Holly Time won the World’s Greatest Horseman in 2018, after a Championship show career and now is standing for you at Oswood Stallion Station. How is that working out?

A - We are really happy to be partners with Oswood’s, they have done a tremendous job breeding and shipping semen for us all throughout the World. We have bred horses from Australia to Italy, to Brazil, to Canada and here in the United States. We have bred a lot of mares over the last five years. It has been very successful, and now we have launched his baby 1910 who is his most successful baby until this point, out of the great Lil Miss Shiney Chex. She is the top cow horse producing mare of all time now. We own her as well. We are breeding 1910 this year (his first year), so we have a junior stallion under Hickory Holly Time as well.

Q - You have three beautiful stallions: Hickory Holly Time, Nineteen Ten, and Metallic CD, and a broodmare band of 18 fancy horses. What do you look for when matching horses for your breeding program?

DEAN TUFTIN

A - I was always a big stickler with my mares. Every mare that we bred when we started out, I rode. I knew how they moved, how they thought, how they performed. It felt like that gave me a real insight into how to breed them, not just how they were on paper but how they really were. I rode everything on my ranch, so I tried to expand it as much as I could by bringing in mares that were performed on. Maybe I saw them at a show, or had the opportunity to buy them, or maybe leased an embryo or something like that. Generally, it was always to breed to the very best mares that we could. We have worked hard to hold that true as much as we can. I really look for how a mare moves, how a mare thinks, the type of performer they are as an individual. Because I feel that 75% of that baby is the mare. We start with trying to find those matches - sometimes you hit, sometimes you miss, but sometimes you really hit! With Lil Miss Shiney Chex we have been super successful with Hickory Holly Time crossing on her, but she has proven she can cross on other studs and the foals proved to be successful as well. We had the high seller two years ago at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Sale with a foal by Hickory Holly Time out of a mare name Cat Mist. Cat Mist also was a producer of SJR Diamond Mist which Corey rode and won the World’s Greatest Horseman on in 2018. Those type of crosses are quite easy. Your hope is that you cross a World Champion mare on a World Champion stallion and you hope for the best, but sometimes you do not get the performer you are looking for, but it sure ups the odds.

Q - You stepped up as the major sponsor with naming rights to the upcoming DT Horses Western Derby at WestWorld and that support was critical to securing a three-year contract with Scottsdale and attracted other sponsors and stakeholders to contribute. Why contribute as the major sponsor at this time?

A - I felt like Westworld was the perfect facility for a major cowhorse show. Unfortunately, those spots had been taken for years because there were only four majors that they had. The opportunity with the Derby coming up, we had some options. Other places had their hat in the ring, but really what happened was that it was almost the luck of COVID last year, where it ended up Arizona was the only place that we could have it. So, they ended up moving it here and everyone ended up here and overwhelmingly understood how great it was here in Scottsdale. It ended up not being so much of what I did as much as they just discovered the great place that we have right here at Westworld with the City of Scottsdale. It is a perfect place for this, it is the perfect match. It is a nice geographical spot right in between the West Coast and Texas, so I feel like it’s just going to grow like gangbusters these next few years. Westworld is also a wonderful place because youhave all these different buildings under air conditioning, so these guys can bring some of their other horses, maybe their three-yearolds and they can ride them in all the other arenas. That’s going to bode well for people bringing more horses to this show. It’s going to be big this year! It’s going to really expand. Paso Robles was too far for the eastern people to travel to, and it was truly not the facility that Westworld is. Scottsdale is the best, that is one of the main reasons we moved our operation here. We actually moved down here in 2017 full time. Years ago we had a house here. So, we would come down here periodically. I had young kids in elementary school, so we would come at Christmas, or Spring Break. And over time when we came, we did not want to leave. We loved it here! I have a lot of friends in the roping industry here and when I roped professionally, we actually lived here one-year full time. We loved it! But when our kids got into school and for business reasons, we ended up moving back to Oregon. But, the whole time I missed it and my family missed it. We ended up moving full time and it has been a wonderful, wonderful move for us because we love it here.

Q - With the resources invested here one could have a ranch anyplace in the world. Why did you choose Rio Verde?

A - The weather for me is a big thing, and I am a big team roper. I competed at the Wrangler Jeans Showdown in 1992 for Canada in the Team Roping. That was one of the first times I had been here, and I didn’t want to leave. It was like, this is amazing. All of the people were horse people and it just felt like a community here that I wanted to be part of. It took years to get back here, but we love the move. We love the weather! This is a great place to train horses. People always worry about the heat, but we do not have the humidity. We have nine of the best months you can have of anywhere to train horses. It’s very predictable, so you can plan your day. I was in Texas yesterday, it can be beautiful, then a nice storm the next day, then a humid hot mess and not a bunch of fun. I love Arizona, and I like to play golf too. For me, where can you find a place that is great to live in, low humidity, no bugs! The winters are just tremendous here. It’s the best! That’s why everyone from the North West, everyone from Canada, that’s why they come here. For this great weather. That’s why I am here. We are in a little bubble; my wife and I talk about the North Scottsdale bubble and that is where we live and where we are raising our kids. I have two teenage daughters; one is about to go to Texas for college this Fall. I have to tell them, it’s not all this nice, like it is here. You are going to have weather, you are going to have crazy people, crazy freeways, all this other stuff. We are in a very fortunate spot being where we are here. We love it!

Q - What is the best way for someone looking to compete in NRCHA events to get started?

A - The very best thing is that there is so much information now that you can get off of the internet or YouTube and social media. But it’s really to find that person that you can trust, whether it’s a professional trainer, or it does not have to be a professional trainer, it just has to be a horse person. A horseman. Really get involved that way. People really lack general horsemanship. The best thing anyone can do first is to learn general horsemanship. It does not matter what it is that you are doing - roping, cow horse. The best people to learn from are great horsemen. Surround yourself with great people, fun people, and great horsemen, and that is the quickest way get involved. All of our horses, all our colts, we start working them on the ground. Clinton Anderson is right down at my other arena here. He stays with me periodically. Most of my guys here do “The Method” on the young colts and we feel that sets those colts apart because they are using the thinking side of their brain. They are soft on the ground. If they are soft on the ground, that usually transfers to their back. They are not scared of you, they are working with you from day one.