About Montie Eagle
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Montie Eagle is the author of The Rose in Prime and coming soon Riding Anyone? The Starter Rider's Handbook of Horsemanship.
​Montie has studied classical dressage since 1984, working for several years with Pat Smeltzer and her mentor Karl Mikolka. Karl was a former head rider from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and taught using the Weyrother Method. This method was named Max Ritter von Weyrother, a head rider at Vienna at the early part of the nineteenth century.
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​​She became interested in other aspects of producing calm and obedient dressage horses, receiving a thorough foundation in groundwork and using the round pen from Jay Catherman, who had studied John Lyons' techniques. Jay would say, "The horse you lead is the horse you ride". And it's true. If your horse won't listen to you when you are on the ground, why do you think things will change when you're sitting on his back?
Montie studied the training techniques used by John Lyons for ten years before getting to ride in a professional trainers' clinic with John in 2006. Later that year, she audited a clinic given by Jack Brainard and was greatly surprised to find out this trainer of reining horse champions cued his horses from their footfalls, just as in the Weyrother Method. ​
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Montie and John Lyons,at his November 2008
clinic in Chesterfield VA
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​​She rode in several clinics with Jack, and twice flew to his ranch in Texas to continue working with him. He was her mentor for fifteen years until his death in 2021.​
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"Working with the best of both classical dressage and western riding made me want to seek out the underlying principles of all the valid lines of thought I had experienced in decades of learning. What were the ideas and truths all these great horsemen trained by and taught? And more importantly, how could these ideas help my students understand their own horses better and continue to become better horse people?"
Montie has been a guest clinician at the PA Horse World Expo several times since 2005.
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