Rick Meyer

Rick Meyer

Gaited Horse Clinician

Background

Rick Meyer, president and owner of Royal Oak Ranch, Troy, Ill., will be a presenter at the 2012 Midwest Horse Fair®. Rick started working with Thoroughbreds, Quarter Horses and Polo Ponies in the early 1970s. He has trained Walking Horses, Appaloosas, Paints, Quarter Horses, Morgans, Arabians, Icelandics, Peruvian Pasos and Fox Trotters, and in 1978, started training and breeding Paso Finos. Rick won his first National and Grand National Championship at the 1979 Paso Fino Nationals. During the early 1980s, he became a Senior Certified Judge and Steward.

Rick co-authored the first “step by step” training book for Paso Finos, “Horse Sense in Training,” which is now in its fifth printing. In 1986, he won his first World Cup Championship at the Mundial in Puerto Rico. He helped organize the Professional Trainers Association and was the first president of that organization. Rick has conducted numerous training clinics around the country, and managed the largest Paso Fino herd, of over 250, in North America during the late 1980s.

To date, Rick has won over 150 National Championships in Bellas Formas, Classic Fino, performance, pleasure and specialty classes. He was voted the 1993 Trainer of the Year by his peers, and judged the 1997 World Cup in Cali, Colombia.

Recently, Rick has been co-founder and past president of the St. Louis Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association and the Illinois Renegades. He was a 2003 National Top Ten Cowboy, placed fourth at the 2006 World Cowboy Mounted Shooting Championship, and won the 2008 Mid-Eastern CMSA Championship as a Senior Men’s 4.

As owner and operator of the well-known Royal Oak Ranch, Rick currently spends his time doing clinics and appraisals, training Paso Fino horses and Cowboy Mounted Shooting horses, and enjoying his two grandsons.