We are Jeff and Christina Tift. We have been married for 9 years, and enjoy working together with our horses and mules everyday. We love everything we do with our horses, from getting to know them, teaching them softness and respect, developing a loving, willing and understanding relationship, to taking nice relaxing outside rides in the mountains and doing ranch work.
We find our job very rewarding, as we see our horses and mules progress every day, and eventually find them a new, loving, permanent home.
(The parade a Jake Clark Mule Days)
We make sure, that all of our horses and mules gets accustomed to the real outside world, along with arena work. We enjoy training our horses with the natural horsmanship methods, teaching our horses to give softly to the bit, and moving smoothly from our legs, which makes it possible to lope nice collected circles, do turn arounds, backing, sidepassing, stopping and rollbacks.
We also take every opportunity we have to take our horses and mules outside the arena and give them a real job as we find, that what really makes a horse or mule a great animal, is long days of riding behind cattle in the mountains, being packed or just ridden down the trail for a long ride. It gets them tired and gives them a purpose for doing what we ask of them.
We also spend time working our horses and mules with tarps and ropes along with crossing different obsticles to help make them less liable to spook or be watchy.
At the end of the day, all of our horses and mules gets turned out for the night, running on about a 1000 acres of rolling hills.
For more pictures of our day to day life and training click here.