Roy and Honey Bee King.

Who is Roy Yates?

Roy Yates has spent his whole life as a teacher and a student of horses. There is no one more knowledgeable anywhere in the equine business today. As a youth growing up in Missouri, he rode three and five gaited horses. As a young man in the 1950s, Roy went west with the romantic dream of becoming a true cowboy. On his way to becoming a horse trainer, he worked on several cow outfits in Montana and Oregon. Roy has trained horses for all events including dressage, jumping, and western pleasure, however, reining is his forte. Roy is a philosopher of horse training. He bases much of his philosophy on that of French and Portuguese trainers who rode their horses on a slack rein. Roy believes in using true horsemanship to train a horse and not gimmicks or quick fixes. He believes the art of horse training is an ongoing learning process. Roy has trained consistently for more than forty years without a break, during which the horse industry has been his only source of income.

Roy's business is training horses, starting young horses, teaching people to ride and train and shoeing. He stands five will-bred performance stallions and owns three of them. Roy has been an American Quarter Horse Association judge, a National Reining Horse Association judge, a National Cutting Horse Association judge, an American Paint Horse Association judge and an approved Appaloosa Horse Club judge. During Roy's long career he has started thousands of young horses as well as riding and finishing hundreds more. Roy has trained many Register of Merit and Superior horses in many different events including Reining, Western Riding, Western and English Pleasure, Hunter over Fences, Working Cow Horses, Cutting, Barrel Racing and Pole Bending.

Roy and My Sugar Max. © Gary Grubb.

Roy has had students from every state in the United States and five provinces in Canada. He has also had students from Australia, Austria, Mexico, Germany and France. One of Roy's students is a three time World Champion Free Style Reining Horse Rider. Another student won most of the Rookie Reining competitions in Colorado as well as many surrounding states in his first year of competition. Roy has students in British Columbia, Canada that have taken the shows by storm in that area. Another student has shown and won in many events in AQHA and NRHA and is a successful trainer, teacher breeder and judge in South Dakota. Another student is an approved judge with five different breed associations and has a very successful training business in Franktown, Colorado. A student from Ontario, Canada has been a youth champion in AQHA. Another student has won numerous awards in AQHA, including Register of Merit and Superior awards as well as winning sizable amounts of money in NRHA competition. She is riding a horse that is sired by one of Roy's stallions and they are almost unbeatable in reining competition. An Arabian gelding that Roy trained was a two-time Arabian Youth National Hunter Pleasure horses in 1996.

For more than 25 years, Roy has conducted hundreds of horse training clinics in most of the western half of the U.S., as well as traveling all over Canada. His students vary from the very beginners to the very advanced professional trainers. Everyone that attends Roy's clinics come away learning something that they can apply in their horse training program. Roy has always been well received at his clinics and he has always been asked to return. Roy has also had magazine articles printed in widely recognized national horse publications such as "Western Horseman", "The Quarter Horse Journal", "The Reiner" as well as numerous others. Roy is a firm believer in the use of video and audio as training aids and has developed his own series of videos and audios.

It is apparent from Roy's own accomplishments as well as those of his students' and by his wide acceptance at his horse training clinics that Roy has a proven system of horse training from start to finish. He has developed a complete set of horse training videos that show in great detail his system of horse training. He also has a complete set of audio tapes that parallel the videos. With very limited advertisement, they have sold in almost every state in the U.S. as well as internationally.

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