Meet JoJo!   He’s a Missouri Fox Trotter mule that forgot to be gaited.  JoJo belongs to myself, Brandy Von Holten.  My husband and I own a trail riding facility 14 miles SE of Sedalia, MO.  JoJo is currently our only mule but he will not be our last.  I am the new Chair for the Versatility Trail Program with NASMA and I wanted to introduce myself and my mule.

I purchased JoJo as a 7 year old mule from the Urton family.  Their son had joined the military and JoJo wasn’t being ridden so they decided to sell him.  I bought him sight unseen from a facebook post in March 2016.  The learning began the second day of owning him when I ask my husband to get on bareback which did not end well.  I quickly wondered if I had gotten myself into something I could not handle.  I was officially scared to death.  Our rides for the next few months consisted of helmets, smaller areas, and someone nearby.  In July of 2016, I was asked to judge the Benton County Rodeo Queen competition.  It was there that I realized that their queen competition did not have standard rodeo queen restrictions and that someone of my age could enter.  It was at this event that I set a goal of being the 2017 Benton County Rodeo Queen.   A mule had never been entered by any of the past participants in the history of the rodeo, so I already knew who I was going to use, JoJo.  This is how our journey together began.

In order to be prepared for a rodeo environment and to bring JoJo’s training from an occasional trail ride to a finished competition mule included obstacle training, dressage, a drill team, and sorting.  Obstacles were my first aspect to address.  He just needed some “life” introduced to him.  To my surprise, he was a natural when it came to not being scared of manmade obstacles.  But then sometimes, something odd would get his attention and he would not be able to do as I ask.  For example, at our very first obstacle competition he was not able to complete three obstacles because he was so worried about a baby blanket in the bleachers that a guest had forgotten.  By the end of the 2017 obstacle season, we qualified for nationals in three divisions:  Green Horse 1, Green Horse 2, and Open.  He even placed in the top five at his first Extreme Cowboy competition.  With our success with obstacles, I felt confident in his ability to handle a parade.   I pushed my luck and even carried the American flag.  Now that I had him introduced to odd things in his environment, I still needed to increase our mulemanship.  I turned to western dressage.  We entered into the 2017 Festival for the Horse, and won the Reserve Champion in the Open Division.  This was a dream come true, but was only made possible from the weekly practices of the Country Tough Drill Team.  The drill team has given me the opportunity to form friendships while advancing my riding skills.  Talk about team work!  Some of the horses did not know what to think about JoJo at first, but now they do not get upset when he is chewing on their saddle pads, standing way too close, or demanding love from every person there.  Our final component to ready ourselves for the rodeo queen competition was to introduce cattle.  He was a little squirrely at first but then quickly got the hang of sorting.  By the time the 2017 Benton County Rodeo Queen competition rolled around, I was so pleased with the journey we had taken that it was just icing on the cake when we actually WON! 

JoJo now has a coloring sheet designed after him for people to pick up in the office and is the character in my second children’s book coming out in 2018!  I hope to do a good job for the VTP program and help people from all over see the versatility of a mule.