The Cutting Edge
To train his horses, Joe Ammann works buffalo not cattle
Story and photos by Lisa Broadwater

This one definitely warranted a doubletake: a herd of buffalo lazily grazing alongside Highway 65 near Damascus. Sure, our ultimate destination may have been Mountain View, but how could we not stop? I mean, buffalo? On Highway 65?
So we pull a one-eighty. Inch our way up the gravel driveway (no, our eyes didn't deceive us — more than 40 buffalo really are here). Ask a few questions. Learn something new about training cutting horses.
Turns out that bison are the latest tool in the cutting world.
Who knew?
Actually, "People have been using buffalo for 15 or 20 years," trainer Joe Ammann tells me later as we survey his herd. "I think the reason they've hit hard in the past few years is that cattle got expensive and they're getting hard to find because there are so many cattle events — team penning, cutting, roping, all that stuff — and they use a lot of cattle.
"So it's hard to find cattle you can train cutting horses with because they've all been crashed and banged around in an arena already and they get sour. When you go to the sale barn and buy 25 head, you don't know where they've been or what they've done. You get them home and then realize they ain't no good; they've already had the you-know-what knocked out of them. But I've had really good luck with the buffalo."
The most obvious question is, "Why buffalo?"
Because they produce the same results — a well-schooled cutting horse — a lot more efficiently.
"I can get the same use out of 10 buffalo that most guys would get out of 300 or 400 cows," Ammann says. "Cattle just wear out. You can work a buffalo five or six times a day. But you do that with a cow, and the second time, he says, 'This is it. I'm tired of this, and you can put me in my pen where I can get my hay and my feed.'
"The main thing with cutting horses is stopping, turning and rating the cow," Ammann explains. "In 'rating,' the horse has to decide how fast a cow is going and when he's gonna stop and when he's gonna turn and how fast he's gonna speed up when he stops and turns, and all that.
"Buffalo are harder to rate than cattle because when it's time to stop, you can't hardly tell they're fixing to because they just slam on the brakes. Their facial expression doesn't change. I feel like if my horse learns how to read a buffalo, he can read any cow in the world."
There are other benefits to working with buffalo, too. When training a cutting horse, Ammann says, "I'm trying to build that horse's confidence, and cattle don't let you do that as well as buffalo. Buffalo will work in a line; they'll work away from your horse, and they'll look at it once in a while. They stay busy.
"Now, a cow, when it gets sour, it starts hunting for a hole to break through and get back to the herd really hard; they'll lean on your horse and just run from one corner to the other. And it'll be complete pressure the whole time. But the buffalo will roll around in the pen, and they won't really hunt for that hole to beat your horse. So you can work more maneuvers."
What's great about working with buffalos, Ammann says, is their consistency:
"I know which buffalo I need to work to match what each horse needs to work on. Because most of the time, buffalo work the same from one day to the next. But you can't ever figure out what a cow's thinkin'. You can work 10 cows and still not have your horse worked the way you wanted it worked.
"With the buffalo, I can match that horse's weakness with a buffalo's strength and work for five to 10 minutes and be done with it. And the horse hasn't been rode into the ground until he's miserable. And he's worked on what he needs to work on and hasn't worked on what he doesn't need work on.
"That's another thing I really like about the buffalo: They allow me to shorten up my periods of working my horses."

Getting Along
Ammann grew up on a cattle ranch in South Dakota (in fact, he says, "That's the only life I've ever known"). He's been cutting competitively since about 1988 and training about as long. After graduating from high school in 1983, he moved to Kansas to work for a horse trainer, where he remained until 1996, when he moved to Hope, Ark., to train cutting horses for pro golfer Hal Sutton. In 1999, he moved to Wilberton, Okla., to train cutting horses for former NFR bull rider Spanky Brown. About a year later, he decided it was time to get out on his own and build his own clientele. He's currently training about 14 horses, including several of his own.
"A lot of people thought I was crazy for moving over here," Ammann admits, "but there's a lot of opportunity here — Monday through Friday, there's training, and weekends there's showing. And I pretty much show year-round. I love living here," he says.
He also loves his buffalo.
"I've learned a lot about their personalities," he says. "They've got a cool personality when they get gentle. They entertain themselves. You can sit out there and all of a sudden this pasture full of buffalo will just start running and playing tag — running circles at 100 miles an hour. And they'll do that for 30 minutes on their own, for no reason.
"They'll just take off — they'll go to buckin' and kickin' and chasin' each other and just actin' like a bunch of idiots. It's hilarious. Then all of a sudden, they'll stop, and they'll be done. And they won't do it no more for the rest of the day. And it might be two or three days before they do it again, but when they do it again, they cut loose, and hoot and holler and grunt."
Ammann got the idea of using buffalo after visiting several trainers who use them. Not that everyone is suited to the task.
"There are a lot of people who don't get along with buffalo," Ammann says, "because they don't have the patience to wait on their personality to change from wild to tame."
When you first get them, he says, "They're very, very, very wild."
For the first couple of weeks, Ammann keeps the buffalo in a large round pen. There, he says, "they just watch me come and go. I walk in and feed them, and they all crash into the fence on the other side. And when they hit something, they really mean it. Definitely, if you had a barbed-wire fence in that close of quarters, you couldn't keep them — they'd be gone. They have a very high flight instinct; they're just like deer. They're definitely a wild animal, and you've got to respect that."
In fact, he says, "If you don't respect that part of it, you ain't gonna get along with them. They're not like a cow at all. When they get to know me and they've been in that pen two or three weeks, they'll get pretty acclimated to what I'm doing around here — I'm driving a tractor or riding horses, which they see plenty."
At that point, Ammann begins training the buffalo.
"The first two or three times you work them, you'd better work them with a horse that knows what he's doin' because if you let 'em beat ya the first time or two, they're really hard to train," he says. "They get really wild — real bold and aggressive. You can still get it out of them; it just takes a little more work. The next time, your horse better be prepared to go for about 30 minutes.
"I've had them go for 45 minutes and never stop — just running back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, on and on and on. And you're wondering if your horse is gonna be dead or the buffalo is gonna be dead. The buffalo are tough — they were bred to run the range, and they can go miles and miles and miles."
That stamina is perhaps the biggest difference between a buffalo and a calf.
"The wild-animal thing is probably what gives them their stamina," Ammann explains. "You work a cow three times, and it's just about figured out what's up; "you work a buffalo three times, and it's just starting to get the hang of it.
"Cows are actually smarter than buffalo, but their personality is different. I get irritated with them because when I've got 25 head of cattle here, I'll go get 'em and think I'm gonna work all my horses off cattle, and by mid-morning I'm fed up with them.
"Buffalo fool a little easier. I think they have a little more fun with it too. I don't think they think it's as big as drag as cattle do. For example, I'll take a young horse and cut a buffalo that's getting kind of slow. I'll work him for two or three moves, and then I'll let the buffalo beat me and let him go back to the herd.
"If I give him a day off and let him watch everybody else work for a little while, the next time I work him, he's looking for that hole I let him through the other day and he's thinkin' he might make it through there again. Sometimes, if he's really, really slow, I'll let him beat me again. And they fall for that! They're very inquisitive too. They're as curious as we are."

A Bit More about Buffalo
Ammann buys his buffalo (20 to 25 at a time) when they're between 8 months and a year old. At that point, they weigh between 250 to 350 pounds. He has one primary criteria when making his selections:
"I'm not real worried about how big they are, but whether they're healthy," he says. "If they're skinny or raggedy-looking, that's not good. I've had that kind, and they just didn't work out as well."
Ammann actually has three different herds right now, which he mixes by size.
"This year, I'm trying something different," he explains. "I'm putting fresh ones in with some used ones in three different groups. Hopefully, I can use one group for a few hours, then another for a few hours and make them last longer by not working them so hard.
"I've been using the bigger ones to start the younger horses on because they don't move around so fast. They let me handle them, so you can utilize the gentler ones with the younger horses and get them started on something slower until they get the hang of it.
"I have 18 I bought last fall, and some of them have gotten really big," he adds. "Seven or eight of them are already 500 or 600 pounds. I put them in with some of my smaller 2-year-olds, which are about the same size, so they don't have to fight for food.
"Buffalo are really herd-oriented; they love to be together — much more so than cows."
For example, Ammann says, "If one of the herd got on the other side of the fence out there on the road, he'd run up and down that ditch and it would drive him crazy not to get able to come back in because he wouldn't have his buddies next to him."
And for those folks who think they'd like to try out a buffalo or two (or maybe just pick one up as a pet), think again.
"If someone is looking to get a buffalo, they need to get three or four, because one don't cut it; you'll break his heart," Ammann says. "I don't think they can survive by themselves. Now, if you threw them in there with cattle, they could probably buddy up to the cattle, but they have to have something to depend on; they'll stress themselves practically to death without some kind of company. And they like their own kind the best."
Although some trainers prefer to work buffalo with a partner, "I do that myself," Ammann says. "Buffalo are a lot easier to deal with one-on-one; if you crowd them too much, if you have too many people in there on horseback at first, if they feel too congested, they get really silly. They don't like to cooperate when there's a lot of activity going on.
"Now, the ones I've had a while, if I was working with them and had a turnback man, they would be absolutely awesome, with a little bit of encouragement. They work better that way than any cow in the US. But when they're fresh, you don't want to put any pressure on 'em because they feel pretty pressurized already."
The bottom line, however is the ultimate result. Are horses actually better trained after working with buffalo?
"I think so," Ammann says. "And I think I've become a better trainer since I started using buffalo. They just give you more time to do things with your horse — they give you time to relax your horse. When a cow stops, sometimes there's no sit-there-and-wait program. But when I'm working a young horse, if all of a sudden everything stops, it's nice to just sit there for a minute and let that horse wonder what's gonna happen — 'Can I relax?' And they need to relax; they need to learn that they can relax for a minute.
"I've just found that the buffalo are more at ease with that than cattle are. They let my horses be at ease. And for some reason, when cattle are puttin' pressure on you, they won't stop until they either beat ya or have gotten so tired they can't go no more. And when they've gotten so tired they can't go no more, they're just gonna walk away from you, go in the corner and lay down.
"But a buffalo will just stand there. You can wait for him to make up his mind what he wants to do, or if you get tired of sittin' there, you can take your horse and drive to that buffalo a little bit, and he's gonna go somewhere."
Even though incorporating buffalo into a training program is becoming more commonplace, Ammann still endures his share of grief from nay-sayers.
"Some people say buffalo move different, and this and that — that it's just not the same as with a cow," Ammann says. "But I try to explain to them that a buffalo has four legs and a head, too; and it goes left and it goes right; it goes right and it goes left, and it stops."
To find proof that a cutting horse can learn as much from the buffalo as from cattle — and easily make the transition from one to the other — Ammann says, you need only look as far as his training facility.
"I've got a mare of my own who's 5," he says. "Even on this place, I bet I haven't worked cows on her maybe 15 times. I've been training her since she was 2 — and she's as good as any cutting horse I've ever shown. She just knows what to do with the cows when she goes to a cutting.
"Actually, I think she has more respect for a cow when she goes to a cutting after working buffalo," he adds. "And I don't think I can explain that. I've worked her on cattle for two weeks straight, and I felt like I wasn't as prepared as I was when I worked buffalo for two weeks straight and went to the same show. I felt like my horse was better prepared."
But for now, the notion of cutting with buffalo is still pretty novel around here. Gawkers like me, who pull off the highway and insist on some kind of explanation, are a fixture at Ammann's place.
"Oh yeah, it's a daily thing," he says. "Fridays are awful — people by the jillions; it just seems never-ending. I'll be out there riding and they'll say, 'Stop! What are you doing?' A lot of people just don't have a clue."