“According to my parents, when I was still a very young child—around three years old—I saw a horse for the first time in my life. I saw it and apparently ‘fell completely in love.’ I think animals have always been, and still are, very important to me. However, among all of them, horses have always been the most important.
As I remember, at around the age of five I was already strongly insisting that my parents let me start riding or have anything to do with horses. It might sound as if I was somehow ‘terrorizing’ them, but I don’t think it was quite that bad. In fact, I think my parents had it relatively easy in one respect—whenever there was a horse nearby, they could simply leave me by the fence and go about their business. I would just stand there, watching a horse—or horses—for hours, and that alone made me happy…”