MikeMooreMedia

Best Shot Barrel Horses and Therapy 09.05.24

Savannah Banner, owner. Services, Appalachian Trainer Facc Off, story of Gilligan and history of the Appalachian Brumby, increase in popularity in the performance horse world. www.BestShotBarrelHorses.com

Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 05 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Mike Moore Media. Now I'm talking to Savannah Banner at best shot barrel horses and therapy right here in Rockingham County. Hey, Savannah. How you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing fine. And lovely fall morning, I guess, at the ranch or where you are, what's going on there? It's beautiful outside. I'm glad to have some cooler weather. Yeah, very nice. Well, I'm learning here, getting acquainted with you. So let's start first by finding out about best shot barrel horses and therapy. What is that? That's a business that I started back in 2018 for my horse training services and a therapy for our equine partners, where I have a magnolade machine and I go out and work on other horses for muscle soreness and a whole bunch of different things that a PMF machine does and we won't get into that. And it's a horse training business. Mm-hmm. Okay. Now how did you get into this? This is probably something you've been doing from an early age, I imagine. I got into horses as third generation horse trainer, actually. My grandfather trained and then my mother also trained some and then I started. So I've had horses my entire life. Yeah. So it was my first horses when I was five. Wow. That originally started out doing a little bit of western pleasure and I rode some walking horses and tried to hunter jump first stuff and then I was twelve. I got my first barrel, well, started running barrels on my mom's old horse and then I ended up buying my first barrel horse project at fourteen. Oh my goodness. You did start early a while. A little while. Yeah. I would say. Yeah. And this is a real passion for you. Why do you enjoy you so much? What do you like about this? I get to live my dream. Every day I go out here and I spend time with horses and that's just what I love to do. I'm not sitting in an office. I can make a bond with the horse and really express myself through them and all the time, all the while chasing my goals at the barrel racing world of moving up in the industry and training security horses. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And this is something that it's just growing in popularity, isn't it? Absolutely. The performance horse world is growing like wildfire and every day something's changing. So we're always learning about which direction we're moving into but it has, in the last five years, took a big boom where it's exploded and everybody wants to be running barrels or doing a speed event or getting into the rain and horses. Yeah. Why do you think that is? What kind of move this forward so quickly in the last few years? Um, honestly, I think that there's been a lot of politics that's entered into the horse show world which means like the, the western pleasure stuff is actually judged and people have gotten tired of that and wanted to move into something that you can't argue with. You can't argue with the timer than the day. Yeah. Okay. And there's a lot of money in it and I think it all boils down to money when these barrel horses are selling for extreme amounts of cash that everybody wants to get involved, they want to be caught. Yeah. Give us an example, what kind of price are you looking at there for these horses? Some of the stud horses have sold at the pink and ruby buckle sales from anywhere between a half a million and a million dollars and some of them went over that. Wow. My goodness. Okay. We also have big incentives now to where we can, we're running for a whole lot more money. We used to, you couldn't even win a hundred thousand dollars in a year, ten years ago and now people are winning one hundred, five hundred thousand on a security cult and that's a big incentive to get into it when you can actually make money at it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just getting bigger and better on lots of levels. For sure. Yeah. Okay. I've learned the, the letters here, A-T-F-O. What is that? That's the Appalachian trainer face off. Um, it is a face off brought to us by a heart of Phoenix organization that trainers from across mainly the East Coast, but we've got some from the West Coast this year too, that we come together and apply to be a part of this competition, that's a hundred day challenge. And you go and you take up a horse, there's different levels. I applied for the Diamond Division, which was an unstarted horse and you get a hundred days to train this horse and you go back to Windfield, West Virginia at the end of the competition and you compete for three days. Now tell us about your horse. My horse I chose this year was some Gilligan. He's a four year old Appalachian Brumbi and an Appalachian Brumbi is a horse that at some point there's been horses turned loose all across the Appalachian Mountains, whether it was from owners just putting a fort to feed them, they got loose and they'd have congregated in these places like strip mines and they have essentially become walls, um, just like your mustangs, but at one point they were domesticated and he had come into the heart of Phoenix, Equin rescue as a two week old soul that was hit by a car and he had been with them since then because he had some life threatening injuries, he had to stay with the vets a long time and I picked him at the come day because he was the only horse in the barn that come to the front of the stall to see me. He wasn't my first choice. My first choice got chosen because we had to draw a hat out of a hat, our name as to what order we got to pick our horse in, but he was definitely my second choice and that was why. He was friendly, he was really personable and I like a personable horse and he would fit into my program really well that way. This is fascinating just going back to what you said about these horses and, you know, it's wild and that's another whole story in itself, isn't it? It kind of, I don't know of any direct correlation, it kind of makes me think of the outer banks in our state and the horses that are still there and been there for a long, long time. Yeah, they have. I think that from my understanding it's a mix of different breeds and some of them from the quarter horse lineages that were domesticated at one point and then they were released on these mine sites owners for one reason or another and who knows how long they've been there. Whether some of them were born on the mines, at the end of the day nobody could take care of them or they were looking to sell them and release them to save on cost and it's illegal to abandon livestock, especially on the private property and that's what these old mine sites were, so people go in to try to take care of the horses. The heart of Phoenix equine rescue gets called when something is in dire need because often they're starving. My goodness, this is a real rescue mission for sure, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, so tell us more about heart of Phoenix equine rescue. I want to hear more about that. Sorry. My phone broke up. What did you say? I want to hear more about heart of Phoenix equine rescue and what they do. That's a rescue that participates with the apple I can turn your face off and they're advocating for horses across Appalachia. I'm not quite sure when heart of Phoenix was started. I could find that out if that's more than you wanted to know but the founder Tania started this several years back as a mission to help advocate for these horses and she started the name came from a horse, Phoenix was a horse that she rescued in West Virginia during a flash flood in 2010. She was too late to save her in the way that she had hoped but that's where the rescue name bloomed from and that's beautiful to name this after a horse and to have a vision all the way back in 2010 that's come to this type of magnitude where people are coming together to advocate for these horses now is just amazing to look back and see what you can actually do. Isn't that right? Yeah, that is so true. It is and it's an equal nonprofit that solely works off of donations and they have tons of horses in this rescue that they're helping. Do they have, does she have any idea how many horses are out there in these abandoned mines? I'm not going to comment on that because I don't know, I don't know if she has any idea how many there are. I do know that they've adopted a lot of horses from these mines out and they've found them home. There's tons of information online that you can look up as far as piping in the Appalachian Brumbi. What is the Appalachian Brumbi and it'll pull up this information. Yeah. Wow, this is absolutely fascinating and I'm going to do that and I'm going to do a little more homework on this about the Appalachian Brumbi and so tell us a little bit more about Gilligan and how that went and where's Gilligan now and just kind of an update. Gilligan isn't an awesome little horse and I love him dearly. We started out our hunter Dave and we came in, I do a lot of colt starting, colt starting probably my main business venture I would say and that means I get in unbroken horses and put a start on them for 30, 60, 90 days depending on what the owner wants. So when he came in, he was immediately already friendly with that life. He was in my pocket. He liked to be with people, but he was bottle raised or bucket raised actually. He didn't eat out of a bottle, he put milk in a bucket which is easier because it's not his hands on but he liked people. He wanted to be with you all the time so he started out pretty smoothly. It was easy for me to get some groundwork with him. He had a little bit of a bully attitude but it wasn't bad and we worked through it pretty fast and because he wanted to be with me it made our partnership stronger, faster I felt like. Sure. And I actually only had about 25 rides on him. He was so just laid back and chilled and I took him to trail riding the first month. We went up to Leatherwood Mountains and I trail rode for the weekend and he was perfect and I knew then I was like this is a good horse, somebody's going to really enjoy him. And at the end of the competition he actually ended up coming home with me, I adopted him back. He's here. Yep. Okay. All righty. So from West Virginia to Rockingham County. Yep. He's back here with me so anybody can come see him if they want to come meet Gilligan. Okay. Yeah. How many horses do you have there? In the training program right now the numbers vary anywhere from 10 to 16. Right now I have 14 units for training and then I have a couple of lesson program horses and then my fiance Jesse also has horses here. There's about 60 horses on the place right now because my fiance parents board and they have a lot of clients in and out as well. So you've got a big area there. Where are you? We're up off of 770. If you get off of Highway 220 and turn left on 770 we're about five miles out on the left. Mm-hmm. Okay. And do people come from all over the state? Other states? I mean you've got people from close by I guess and far away. For sure. I've had clients send me horses from Indiana. They've come from Florida and quite a wide span of people who have been horses in. Yeah. Mainly North and South Carolina and Virginia is where a lot of my clients come from but we do have horses everywhere. Okay it sounds like it. Our sales business is pretty big. We've sent horses out as far as even Canada. Mm-hmm. Wow. And this is something that you started in 2018 and has grown and grown in wow this is a big business. Yeah. It really has. It took off in the last probably three years it's really grown and I've been able to make a lot of new clients and really fill the barn up with training horses and my dream is come true. Looking back if I've enough this was my goal then and you're like wow I've actually achieved it. Yeah. Well our time is just about, this has been absolutely fascinating to talk to you and find out more about a best shot barrel horses and therapy right here in Rockingham County. Any closing comments you got about a 45 seconds a minute left Savannah. If anybody would want more information you can find me on Facebook at best shot barrel horses and therapy and I also have a website at www.bestshotbarrelhorses where you can find about my training program horseback riding lessons and even the therapy side of it. Oh that's great. Well it's good to get acquainted. We haven't met face to face but I would really like to get out and see what you're doing there. So I'm going to try to do that soon. More good weather coming up here in the fall and that would be a good time for can people come and visit. Can you take tours and things like that? Yeah. Sure. Come on out and I might even like to get a riding lesson. Let's take a ride. Wow. Oh that's even better. Alright. Savannah thanks a lot, live in the dream there with your passion I appreciate what you do. Thanks for this time. Thank you. Alright talk to you soon. So maybe see you soon. Yeah absolutely. Alright we're finding out more about best shot barrel horses and therapy here in Rockingham County. Savannah Banner please check her out on Facebook, find out more about what she's doing and and the many services that she offers.