Life Lessons Learned from Two Horses
Denny Emerson has been an influential name in the equestrian community for more than 50 years. In 2006, Denny was inducted into the U.S. Eventing Association Hall of Fame for his outstanding achievements as an event rider, which include a team gold medal at the 1974 World Championships. He bases his training programs out of his farms in Vermont and North Carolina and is a popular coach with adult amateurs and professionals alike. A consummate writer, Denny has published many articles and books on his training philosophies.
In his latest book, Know Better To Do Better: Mistakes I Made With Horses So You Don’t Have To, Denny reflects on a lifetime of breeding, training and competing horses in a multitude of disciplines. Throughout the book, Denny includes stories about key horses in his career, how they shaped him as a horseman and what he’d do differently with their training with the knowledge he has now. Excerpted here are vignettes about a pair of Denny’s most famous event horses, Cat and Victor Dakin.
CAT
Cat was as plain and backyard as horses get when I bought him for $800 in the late ’60s. He’d supposedly been
