Marion Weisskopff’s Bio

A little bit of history on Marion:
Marion grew up at her parents riding School in West Germany.
Her parents where open minded to different approaches of training horses and different riding styles. Even though her Mother was a certified English riding instructor, she gave Marion the opportunity to learn from many other instructors in different fields of the Equine world.

By the time the family moved to Canada in 1984, Marion was already 
accomplished as a horse person, having earned the
FN. German Bronze and Silver medal for Jumping and Dressage riding and the
FN. Bronze medal for team driving.

Here in Canada, Marion never looked back and had a lot of different experiences with horses. Her first summer in Canada, she got a job as a horse trainer and took the owners young stallion to the shows, winning a Canadian National Championship title in the Junior Trail Horse class.

Later, Marion worked at a few Ranches as a "Cowboy" and also took on some different types of jobs, most of them including horses. In her early 30th. she met her other half "Don", together and shortly after they met, they ran a horse logging business for a couple of years.

After playing around with the fun stuff, Marion developed a horse training technique that works well for her. Having had a background in so many aspects of the horse world, like English Riding,- Western Riding,- Horse logging, -Cow work, training and participating in the 50 day Friesian stallion testing in Texas,-- packing, guiding in the Chilcotin – where she also had the opportunity to be around wild horses on a daily basis, and presenting demonstration shows of riding horses without the aid of bridle or saddle, she combined a lot of what she had learned from the horses she had the privilege to work with and the people that she learned from, to develop her own technique.

In 2001 she went on the road conducting clinics and shares her technique with horse people from all over Western Canada, the US and Europe. She keeps an open mind and keeps learning herself.

Marion is a
CHA Certified level 4 English Riding Instructor including jumping,
CHA Certified level 4 Western Riding Instructor and a
CHA Certified Level 4 Wilderness Guide Instructor.
Also a CHA – Certified Instructor for English, Western, Trail and Driving.

At this time (2009) the highest level CHA Certified instructor in Canada.

Even though Marion used to give bareback demos without the use of halter or bridle on her horses since she was 12 years old, she has learned much more about Natural Horsemanship from different well known Natural Horsemanship trainers and Vaquero’s in N. America.
In any handling of horses you can see a Natural approach to her horse training, no matter what type of riding or handling.

One winter, Marion went to Texas, on a recommendation by a team of German Judges, to help train Friesian Stallions at Proud Meadow Friesians for their 50 day stallion testing. This was the only approved facility in all of North America to train the German registered Friesian stallions.
The stallions had to be trained in those 50 days for Dressage Riding, Dressage Driving, Cross Country Jumping and heavy pulling and where tested by Judges who came from Germany for the occasion at the end of the 50 days.
 What's happening now is that 8 month out of the year you'll find Marion driving to her clinic's, she usually travels between one and two weeks out of each month and logs close to 4000 KM. per month on her truck.

In her "spare time", mostly in the winter month, she trains some horses, sometimes buying horses from rescue situations, spending some time training them and than placing these fine animals into better situations. Sometimes she just comes across a good horse and Purchas's it to have something to offer to her customers when they are looking for a good horse.
You can find many of her horse video’s under this link on you-tube:

Marion and Don have a farm near Princeton, BC. where Marion
trains horses, holds clinics and raises Spanish Andalusian horses.