BRIONES – Last Thursday evening, July 23rd, a crowd of 60 horse enthusiasts from novices to professional trainers gathered at Thomas Ranch for a Xenophon Therapeutic Riding Center fundraiser.
Judy Lazarus, founder of Xenophon, kicked off the event by recounting the organization’s history. Xenophon was founded x number of years ago in Orinda as a therapeutic riding program for disabled children and has grown steadily since that time thanks to its dedicated staff, volunteers and generous donors. Xenophon will soon be operational year round thanks to the donation of a covered arena from (check w/Judy). (x number) children from ages? to? currently participate in weekly riding lessons on Xenophon’s (5?) patient and gentle horses. A scholarship program insures that no child is turned away for financial reasons.
Eric Thomas then took the microphone and shared his philosophy of “natural horsemanship”, developed through a lifetime of working with horses. With equal parts insight and humor, Thomas explained how to use the horse’s natural instincts to create a working team between horse and rider. Emphasizing patience, attentiveness, and open-mindedness, Thomas convincingly showed how to build trust with several different horses. Next, Thomas mounted up to showcase the high performance skills of a reining horse, dazzling the audience by galloping, spinning, and sliding to a stop within a few feet of the spectators seated inside the arena. The crowd then moved to one of the ranch’s outdoor arenas for a cutting horse demonstration. Cutting horses specialize in separating cows from the herd, a skill directly related to ranch work. A mechanical cow named Matilda moved rapidly back and forth on a track while Thomas’s horse nimbly mirrored the cow’s movements, amazingly with no guidance from the rider. Thomas explained that the impressive athleticism and instinct on display has been bred into the modern quarter horse and that the trainer/horseman’s job was “simply to set up the right circumstances for a horse to learn how to use its natural abilities and then let him work.”
Eric Thomas came to the Bay Area to attend UC Berkeley in 1977. He has trained horses professionally for over 25 years and holds numerous titles from Reining, Cutting and Working Cow Horse competitions. He has started hundreds of young horses and is known for re-educating troubled horses considered unridable by other trainers. He and his wife Julie, an accomplished dressage trainer from England, certified by the British Horse Society, own and operate Thomas Ranch in Briones, where they train horses and riders in their respective disciplines.
Thinking back to the cutting demonstration and Thomas’s horse, cat-like in its movements, intently focused on its job of containing a very strange cow, one could not help but think of the beneficiaries of this event. Thanks to Xenophon, its supporters, and horsemen like Eric Thomas, these special-needs children have been given a wonderful opportunity to develop their own natural abilities through riding and contact with horses.
