Stacy Westfall

About Stacy Westfall

Stacy Westfall and Franki Lovato Jr.

Even as a young child growing up in Maine, Stacy loved horses and rode whenever she had the chance. She got her first pony, Misty, when she was six. Her mother Sherri was Stacy’s only instructor in riding and training until she went to college. As Sherri looked on she would ask questions that prodded Stacy to think deeply about the mindset of the animals. “Why do you think Misty just did that?” or “How do you think you could get Bay to want to cooperate? What is she thinking?” The habit of getting inside the horse’s head, of thinking like a horse, became second nature to Stacy.

She also learned directly from the horses. One of her favorite memories is of “accidentally” teaching a horse to sit. While riding with a friend in the winter the girls accidentally backed a horse into a pile of snow. The horse lost its footing and sat on the snow. As the girls laughed Stacy decided to set up the situation again. It wasn’t long before the horse would “sit” on anything she backed it up to.

Stacy always had a desire to train and to teach. When she wasn’t at school you might have found her training her dog to navigate obstacle courses in the yard, or giving a riding lesson to a neighbor. With no professional trainers to observe in her area, she relied on the insights instilled by her mother and the instincts and lessons she learned from the horses...More

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