About Bob Pruitt
Who is Bob Pruitt?
Founded InfoHorse.com in 1997 with his wife Ann Pruitt, who serves as Marketing Director.- More than 50 years of hands-on experience with horses, beginning as a boy working in his neighborhood barns.
- Started and trained all of his own horses using the respect-based methods of modern horsemanship.
- Learned directly at the events and clinics of John Lyons, Richard Winters, and Clinton Anderson, among other horsemen who popularized those methods.
- Has owned horse properties and boarded horses across several states, and has raised three generations of horse owners — his children and now his granddaughters.
- Writes from lived experience, and personally reviews every advertiser on InfoHorse.com.
People ask me why my name is on so many articles and so many pages across InfoHorse. com. The honest answer is simple: I touch every page, and Ann and I check every advertiser ourselves. This site isn't a content mill and it never has been. It's two horse people who've spent their lives at this, telling you what we actually know.
Where I come from
I grew up around horses in our neighborhood, learning how to handle them and, just as important, how to clean a stall and do every other job a young man could get paid for. That early work taught me something I've never let go of — the importance of clean water and a clean stall. The basics are never beneath you. They're the whole foundation.
Forty-five years ago I married my wife Ann. She grew up on the gateway drug — Breyer horses — and by high school she was working summers as a trail guide on horseback around Santa Barbara, California. I bought her first horse early in our marriage, an Arabian colt named Cody. Over the years we added a Morgan mare named Splendor. My own horse was Dream, a PMU rescue, a Quarter Horse and Percheron cross I had for his entire 25-year life. Today I ride a show-type Morgan mare named Zoey, and Ann has a ranch-type Morgan named Sugar. We've bought horses for our kids, and now our granddaughters have horses too. Three generations in the saddle.
I started all of our horses myself, using the training methods and the help of the horsemen I learned from. I've helped a lot of people work through horse-and-human problems — the kind where what's needed is mutual respect, safety, and eventually that bond that's really love and trust. We never missed a chance to learn at a horse expo or a clinician event. And I've read every good horse training book ever written, including the oldest one.
A tradition older than you'd think
Here's something most people don't know. The respect-based training that got popular in the 1990s wasn't invented in the 1990s. A Greek named Xenophon wrote a book called On Horsemanship around 400 BC — roughly 2,400 years ago — describing many of the same ideas: work with the horse's nature, reward the slightest try, make the right thing easy. Popularized is not the same as invented. The good horsemen of my era , Lyons, Winters, Anderson and others — were excellent trainers, but they were also excellent teachers, able to hold a crowd for hours and days. What was new wasn't the horsemanship. It was that the message could finally travel.
The right place at the right time
In 1997, two things were happening at once. Modern horsemanship was breaking out of the round pen and onto VHS tapes and video you could watch at home, in every discipline. And ordinary people were buying their first computers and connecting to the early internet — dial-up, where you unplugged your telephone from the wall and plugged the line into your computer. It was slow. The images were tiny. But there was a new human connection in it that changed everyday life.
So there we were, standing right at the convergence of two revolutions — a revolution in how horses were trained, and a revolution in how information could be shared. Magazine-style websites sprang up, but in my opinion they missed what the internet actually was. I saw a place in the horse world that needed filling with something as unique as the internet itself: real information, about horses and about the products and services that serve the horse industry. The horse industry has something like a $177 billion effect on the economy, and back then finding basic answers meant going to the library or buying magazines and still coming up empty. The truth is, to get real information about horses, you should ask people who have horses. That's us.
If you handle a horse at all, for better or worse, you are a Horse Trainer.
What I believe about horses
That line above isn't a slogan. It's the truest thing I know. We are always teaching a horse something — good habits or bad ones — because the horse is always studying us. The horse didn't put the halter on himself. We invited him into our human world, which makes us responsible for keeping him safe in it. For his sake and for ours.
A few things I've come to believe after all these years. Timing is everything with a horse; the trainers call it feel, and what it really means is knowing the exact moment to release the pressure. The whole relationship fits in one old word if you slow down and look at it — horse-man-ship. And every healthy relationship, with a horse or anyone else, starts in the same place: mutual respect.
Why InfoHorse.com exists
Our business statement has never changed: helping horse owners make informed decisions. There are thousands of products a horse owner could buy. We don't sell any of them — but we do review them. Plenty of visitors have told us they read about something here and then bought it at their local feed store. Others have told us they didn't see a product on InfoHorse.com, so they decided not to buy it. That trust is the whole point, and we've never taken it lightly.
We've been here since 1997, and we're re-born now into this next age of technology, doing the same thing we've always done: helping visitors reach a clearer understanding of our partner, the horse. We love this industry, and we love the people in it — especially the small mom-and-pop companies inventing things to help horses. When they've got something special, our job is to help horse owners at every level find it. We love what we do.
Bob Pruitt — At a Glance
- Role: Founder and CEO, InfoHorse.com (with Ann Pruitt, Marketing Director)
- Founded: 1997
- Experience: 50+ years handling, owning, training, and boarding horses
- Training background: Started all his own horses; learned at clinics and expos with John Lyons, Richard Winters, Clinton Anderson and other excellent Clinician Horse Trainers.
- Horses: Currently rides Zoey (show-type Morgan). Past horses include Dream (PMU rescue, Quarter Horse x Percheron, owned 25 years) and Splendor (Morgan mare)
- Family: Married to Ann 45+ years; three generations of horse owners in the family
- Based in: Keller, Texas
- Philosophy: "If you handle a horse at all, you are a Horse Trainer." All healthy relationships begin with mutual respect.
If you'd like to talk advertising, Ann handles that personally — every advertiser on the site is curated and checked by us. And if you've got a horse-and-human problem you're working through, I hope something I've written here helps. After fifty years, helping is still the part I love most.
