Spotlight on Dan Steers

SPOTLIGHT

One half of Double Dan Horsemanship, Dan Steers talks to AMANDA MAC about his journey from a Perth suburb to the international stage, and his fascinating philosophy on horses at liberty.

It’s easy to look at someone who’s arrived smack in the middle of the equestrian world’s spotlight without fully appreciating the winding, and sometimes difficult road that got them there. That tongue-in-cheek saying ‘it takes ten years to become an overnight success’ is more often true than not. Stretch that out by a few extra years, and you have some idea of Dan Steers’ journey to the top.

To begin at the beginning, Dan didn’t come from a horse loving family. In fact he had little to no interest in horses while growing up in Kalamunda, a town to the east of Perth, Western Australia. But purely by chance all that changed when Dan was 14. He and his classmates were away on a school camp, and as part of the adventure went for a trail

ride on horseback. “That was it for me, I was just fascinated. l went for another few trail rides, and then my dad helped me find someone who gave lessons in natural horsemanship,” says Dan, acknowledging a discovery that would have far reaching future benefits.

His love of horsemanship grew, mainly on the backs of borrowed horses, until he was eventually able to lease a Stockhorse cross mare. An older horse, her zest for life was undiminished. “She was pretty hot on the trail and was great to ride out, but when you turned to come home she just got harder and harder to hold. And not knowing any better, about a kilometre from home I’d just let her gallop back,” Dan recalls, amused by the memory. By the time Year 10 rolled around, Dan knew he wanted a career with horses. So to complete his school’s work experience requirement, he contacted a local Thoroughbred spelling and retraining business and was accepted. It was eye-opening and he learned a lot, but he also realised that the racing industry was not for him.

Although keen to begin working with horses as soon as possible, Dan’s father was adamant that if his son was to leave school at the end of Year 10, it would be to start an apprenticeship and learn a trade. A lucky stroke for young Dan, who became apprenticed to well-known master farrier and horseman Pete Webber. Pete gave Dan a solid grounding in horsemanship as well as in farriering. He also helped him purchase a Quarter Horse yearling. “I kept her at Pete’s place and as I was doing my apprenticeship he taught me how to break her in and train her,” Dan says.

With luck apparently firmly on his side, it turned out that the purchase was better than a good call: “She's a really great mare and pretty much the mother of my complete liberty team, and the sire is a stallion I bought in my early twenties who still performs with us,” he tells me.

By the end of his apprenticeship, Dan had decided that farriering was not his long term dream job. As it happened, Pete also fancied a change of pace and together they began exploring the world of cutting. “The sport was probably a bit amateurish in WA in comparison to the east coast or obviously America, but I pretty quickly got addicted to working cattle. So I started contacting the cutting horse trainers I'd seen in magazines and landed a job with Corey Holden when I was 17.”

Taking his horse and little else with him, Dan travelled to Victoria and completed a six month traineeship with Corey before returning to Perth for Christmas. But by the time he arrived back at Corey’s in the New Year, Corey, a top cutter, had been offered and had accepted a job in the US. Although Dan had the option of going to a different trainer, those circumstances made it easy for him to follow his heart and head home.

During his farriering apprenticeship with Pete, Dan had met Pia, whose father owned a Thoroughbred stud. When the couple started dating, Pia’s dad offered Dan a job. With little or no cutting in WA at the time, Dan had turned his hand to campdrafting, so the fact that there were also Australian Stock Horses on the property made the opportunity irresistible. “We were into campdrafting and showing, so I got to hone my skills on plenty of horses because with the Thoroughbreds there might be 50 or 60 foals a year. Pia’s dad, a really good horseman, and myself were doing most of the foal handling and yearling prep, and then I’d also break and train the Stock Horses with him,” Dan explains.

This productive partnership continued for a number of years until Dan and Pia moved north to manage a 10,000 acre cattle property. “I’d take a few horses in for breaking, we had our own campdraft horses, and I'd be shoeing a few days a week,” he recalls. The work/ life balance suited the couple very well. Pia was studying to be a vet, and the future seemed set. Dan saw himself as a part time farrier and horse trainer, Pia would be a vet, they’d buy a farm of their own, have kids and live happily

ever after in WA. But before their vision came to fruition, Dan’s path crossed with Dan James (who we’ll call DJ to avoid confusion), and that changed the course of things quite dramatically and quite quickly.

Dan met Queensland born and bred DJ, who had had a lifelong passion for horses, at a campdraft. “We had a lot of things in common and we became good friends,” Dan says. “At that point I'd been campdrafting for a fair while, but he was pretty new to it so he asked me for some tuition. Because I had a background in natural horsemanship, I rode some of my horses without saddles and bridles, could lay them down, and do some really basic liberty with them. So I showed him that too.”

DJ, who had been trick riding with his horses and had performed at several shows including the Perth Royal, was then offered a job at El Caballo Blanco, an Andalusian theme park located to the north of Perth. The idea was to bring an Australiana element to the otherwise Spanish riding horse infused show, and DJ had Dan earmarked to be his partner: “I blew him off pretty quickly because Pia and I had our own plans. Pia was in her last year at university, my business was going well and we were really happy.” So DJ took the job on his own and life went on as normal for Dan and Pia.

But not for long! Dan got a call from DJ asking him to come to El Caballo to take a look at a horse with a shoeing problem. Always happy to help, Dan obliged. After he had given his opinion on the horse, DJ invited him to lunch at the onsite restaurant where they were joined by El Caballo’s owner, who began peppering Dan with questions about his life and work.

If at this point you suspect a set-up, you’d be right! “Thinking he was just being friendly, I was telling him what I was up to when he quite abruptly stopped me and said well, you sound too busy to come to work for me. And that was when I realised I was in a job interview,” Dan laughs. Long story short, Dan eventually joined DJ at El Caballo after negotiating an agreement that was very favourable for them both – and it’s a decision he’s never regretted. Their partnership grew as they performed together in multiple weekly shows. Initially, they were training their own horses and using them in the show, which, Dan reckons, was a perfect arrangement as they were getting paid to practice. “We often reminisce about our El Caballo days. It was probably the best deal we've had in our lives. We were very lucky, very fortunate.”

But for Dan it was also a tough time in many ways. Pia had already taken a job near her father’s farm, so it was a three-and-a-half-hour trip from El Caballo to see Pia, and 90 minutes to the farm Dan managed. A hard ask that lasted for around 18 months.

Then DJ, always the entrepreneur, came up with the idea of moving east to grow their business: “And I was pumping the brakes on it,” Dan laughs. “It was probably a bit outside the comfort zone when it came to Pia’s and my plans.”

However, fate had other ideas. While still working at El Caballo, they performed together at the 2008 Perth Royal, which attracted the interest of the Sydney Royal organisers who approached Dan and DJ, asking them to perform in the 2009 Sydney Easter Show. “We put together a quote which included a performance fee and a travel fee. The return travel fee from Perth to Sydney was significantly higher than the fee for 20 days of performing, so combined it was a healthy sum of money,” Dan tells me.

The quote was accepted, and as DJ was quick to point out, their ticket to moving east had just landed in their laps. It was a big decision for Dan and Pia, but they had a contingency plan. Other than the Sydney Royal, the Double Dans had only two other shows booked in the east. “So I thought well, we’ll go over, do those shows and I’ll compete with our stock horses while we're there,” Dan recalls. “Then when we get low on finances, Pia and I can go home and start up our life again.” Not that that reduced the immensity of the decision. Pia resigned from her dream job in a business owned by longtime family friends, who nonetheless encouraged her to go, reassuring her that the job would be there when she returned. “That was nice and we had our families’ support too,” Dan says. “We were at the right age and we didn't have too many commitments. Pia and I were engaged by then and I think our families saw it as maybe a 12 month to two year adventure, before we came home and got serious about life!”

But that wasn’t the way things worked out. After their Sydney Royal performance, bookings began flooding in: Adelaide, Melbourne, a handful of smaller shows, Equitana, WEG, and Australia’s Got Talent, which Dan remembers as a story in itself. “We’d seen the show, and decided we were going to have a crack at it, and although we didn’t know it at the time, it so happened they were looking for animal talent.” The show’s producers approached the Dans through a friend of theirs, a show biz agent, which, although they still had to audition, gave them a bit of a walk up start. With three ‘yeses’ from the judges, they were planning on going through to the next round when filming for the show moved to the Chanel 7 studios in Melbourne. “We got a call from them saying that unfortunately, the horses weren’t going to be allowed into the studio. So if you were following the show, we actually never got voted out. We got the three ‘yeses’ and then we disappeared,” says Dan.

While the Dans may not have progressed any further through the show’s heats, the overall promotional value was staggering. When their episode aired, their Facebook ‘likes’ multiplied rapidly, followed by phone calls from equestrian event organisers wanting to book them. Their appearance was featured on the show’s ‘best of’ reel and was picked up and played by other ‘Got Talent’ franchises around the world.

“I was even recognised in Canada after it aired there,” Dan recalls.

Since then, and more particularly since COVID, DJ has been based in the US with his wife and children, while for the past six years Pia and Dan have been living happily on a property they purchased in Tamworth. Given that the one or two year adventure on the east coast is now closer to 12 years, their families are pretty much resigned to the fact that they’re not coming home. And in that time, Dan and Pia’s own family has grown: “Our eldest is a girl, Zara. She’s six going on sixteen,” Dan chuckles, “and Thomas our little boy is five this year.”

But that doesn’t mean the Dans’ partnership has dissolved – far from it. “Although it’s not what we originally intended, we work individually within the Double Dan Horsemanship brand. He would love me to be there in the States with him, but I stopped at moving east. I’m not going to let him trick me into the US as well,” Dan laughs. “So we perform together as much as we can, and we teach the same program. Whether he's representing the brand, or I’m representing the brand, it's still our brand.”

The conversation then moves on to a subject that fascinates me: training horses at liberty. I ask Dan for his definition and he tells me that for both himself and DJ, it’s more of a philosophy than a technique. Simply put, it's about creating a clear pathway of communication with your horse without having any physical connection, so essentially the horse is able to use their free will. “Once you have communication, you want a willing partnership and that's what it’s ultimately all about. You can't start off without that,” he says.

Of course horses learn through the release of pressure, and with liberty the aim is to create ways for the horse to perceive that what they’re being asked to do is the release rather than the cause of pressure, which as Dan points out, is far harder than it might sound. “They have to recognise it as zero pressure because they now have other options. They’ve got free will and can literally go and stand in the corner and get their own release of pressure. What we have to do with liberty training is to essentially have our ideas become our horses’ ideas so that they’re in control: they want to work around us, they want to lie down, because in their minds, they’re actually training the human.”

And for Dan, that's the fun part, that’s the challenge. “You've got to be really intuitive and focused on your horse’s signals so you can read your horse and make adjustments. We conduct liberty clinics all around the world, although obviously not right now with the COVID situation, and it's something that I’m still inspired to teach because the only way to succeed at liberty is to keep getting better. Once you let go of your horse, you can’t fake it,” Dan says, his enthusiasm obvious. “The horse must be truly willing to work at liberty. I want the horse knowing he's got other options, but not choosing them.”

That suggests the need to fully engage the horse’s active and willing participation: “One hundred per cent!” Dan agrees. “We’re encouraging the horse to be in control. I often say in my clinics, I don’t practice until I get it right, I practice until the horse can't get it wrong. We have to work on the x horse so that they see what we're doing as a reward, as relaxation. And if he's enjoying it, why would he want to do anything else?”

But that’s not how it started for either Dan or DJ, who became successful as entertainers before understanding the relaxation principle, which Dan acknowledges was dangerous because it relied on figuring out how to manipulate the horses into doing what they wanted them to do. “But without willingness there’s no relaxation, and without relaxation, you can only hold it together for so long. It’s totally changed how we perceive things. It means you’ve got to spend more time because it takes more time. It's no different to trying to tell an anxious person to just relax because nothing bad's going to happen. Try saying that and see what kind of response you get,” he jokes.

As I talk to Dan, it quickly becomes clear that he walks the talk. His aim is to give his horses the opportunity to be the best that they can be. It’s a case of figuring out what’s preventing each horse from getting better, he says, and that’s where he and Warwick Schiller align [see the January 2021 Spotlight on Warwick]: “We spend a lot of time talking about this. Because in order to work out what the issue is, you have to be really focused - Warwick calls it being present – and work with the horse so he understands and wants to do better. If you just narrow down on what you think is the problem – he’s not good on the left, or he’s not good at this or that - and then just attack it, that's when the horse says well, I already didn't like that and now you're just making it worse,” he explains. Always keen to learn, Dan reckons that some trainers are more intuitive than others, and they’re the people he benefits from associating with and learning from: “I've had this whole conversation with a lot of other trainers, and to them, if a horse isn’t that good, he’ll never be good enough to perform at a high level, so they’re not interested in spending time with him.”

Dan recognises that if a trainer is in a niche position and is only working with top performance horses, then that approach is understandable. But his take on horsemanship is based on rather a different philosophy: the belief that it’s his job to make the horse the best they can be, or to get as close to it as possible.

And there’s another aspect to this that Dan is very conscious of: “Sometimes I'm not even capable of making them the best they can be, so it’s making them the best that I can make them, and seeing things more from their perspective than mine. And it's really hard to maintain that. I can talk about it, I can preach it, and I can do it for periods of time, and then I get sucked back into being competitive or whatever, and I have to remind myself of my own principles.”

Dan Steers is clearly all for keeping it real.