Marti Sutton (12) has been fascinated by horses all her life. As a four-year-old, she fed wild mustangs at a farm where her mother grew up. As a six-year-old, she started riding horses. As a seven-year-old, she started drawing them. Now, she rides them and competes in rodeos.

“I barrel race in a rodeo. I do two main events—barrel racing and endurance,” she said. “You can’t do endurance in a rodeo though, but I do barrel racing. I’ve also done goat roping which is basically where you jump off and you train your horse to keep going around a goat without you.”

Marti loves the feeling of riding on horses and often rides during her free time for her own enjoyment.

“I kind of like being able to show off, and I like going really fast [when riding],” she said. “It’s pretty cheesy, but it feels a lot like flying. If you could separate yourself from the horse itself, it would definitely be like flying because you can go like 40 miles an hour.”

Though she rides other horses now, her first riding experience was with a horse named Tuxedo.

“One of my favorite horses was this thirty year old horse named Tuxedo, and he was the cutest horse ever,” she said while smiling. “I used to ride him when I was like seven and I’ll still see him … and he’s a super old horse and he taught me how to ride. Tuxedo was the first horse that I had to groom, feed, take care of, tack up.”

She has also met a lot of people and made friends within the horse riding community.

“A lot of people [in the horse riding community] have lots of different opinions, and so there’s definitely communities within the community,” she said. “There’s endurance communities that I’m in and there’s also barrel racing communities that I’m in. Lots of people there are very adamant about caring for your horse, which I’m into. It’s nice to hang out with people who have similar interests, and also that way you can ride more horses because they’ll let you ride their horses.”

In the future, Marti wants to own a horse and maintain a small farm.
“I have plans to own a horse; I want a Clydesdale,” she said. “I love Clydesdales—they’re the giant horses—they’re draft horses, and I want to be able to have my own mini farm. I don’t want to sell anything but I want it to be half self-sustaining and grow myself stuff and eat it. To do that, you would need a tractor but I don’t want a tractor, because tractors are slow, so I want a horse. A horse could pull the plow and since it wouldn’t be a full blown farm, I wouldn’t need a tractor. I also want a Clydesdale because they also have really nice canters, but it will be tricky because Clydesdales eat a lot.”