Dellin Quarter Horses, Dave and Julie Dellin, AQHA Western Pleasure trainer of Congress Champions, World Champions, and winners

"You’ve got to have a method to your madness," David Dellin repeats the catch phrase taught to him by his previous employer, Gil Galyean.

These days, there’s a lot of madness going on in David’s life, with a move to Sanger, Texas to start his own training business. "It’s crazy right now, but it’s all good. I enjoy all the commotion," David says of the 21 horses he moved to Barefoot Farms, where he leases part of the facility for his training program. "We basically have all the stalls we want! Of course, I’m never going to want to fill them all," he laughs..

David recently left his home at Northwind Ranch with his wife, Julie, and two year-old son, Gage. He had worked for the Kern family at Northwind for over three years and thoroughly enjoyed the program he was working with there. "The Kern’s were super-nice to me and gave me a great opportunity when they hired me, but I have always dreamed of being able to train horses for the public. Going out on my own was just the next logical step to follow my dream."

This dream started when David got his first horse at age nine. "I begged and begged my parents to buy me a horse. Neither of them had any horse interest, but they did a lot to support me. My first horse was a big buckskin mare named Tyree’s Brick. She did a lot of different events but wasn’t very good at any of them!" he says. "She did help me learn about horses, though. She taught me how to ride and how to just be around horses. I rode her for awhile and then ended up selling her to a 4-H kid that lived around us. At that point, I decided I wanted to train."

David laughs, "I know that’s pretty early, but I thought teaching a horse was really cool. I started buying some yearlings and two year-olds so I could break and ride them. I really tried right away to learn the right way to train a two year-old."

"I started working for a western pleasure trainer in Tulsa named Jeff Herd. I was 13 at the time. My dad would drop me off with the horse on his way to work. I’d get a riding lesson in the morning and then work for Jeff the rest of the day to pay for the lesson. My dad would come back and pick me up after he got off work for the day." David chuckles as he points out, "My dad pulled that horse trailer to work every day during the summer!"

When David turned 14, he began living at Herd’s ranch during his breaks from school and continued to work there through his sophomore year of college at Oklahoma State University. "During my junior and senior year of college, I did my own thing. I had a little house and a very small-time training facility. I’d keep five or six horses in training at a time, and I’d ride anything anybody would bring me. I mean anything! I broke halter horses, rode cow horses... you name it, I rode it."

While attending Oklahoma State University, David started out in pre-veterinary medicine. Although he had been bitten by the horse-training bug, he still had his child-hood desire to become a vet. "I didn’t want to be just a vet, I wanted to be the top equine surgeon in the country," David says.

During his time at OSU, however, David decided his desire to train horses was too strong to continue on the track to become a vet. He graduated in 1999 with a degree in animal science and a minor in agricultural business.

~ Article by Carly Williams for The Equine Chronicle.

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