Australian Reined Cow Horse Association

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The Australian Reined Cow Horse Association (ARCHA) is dedicated to the promotion and development of all aspects of reined cow horses in Australia. We're new and we're dedicated to bringing you one of the
most exciting horse sports in the world!

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ARCHA 2008 Select Performance Horse Sale

16th September 2008: ARCHA's 2008 Select Performance Horse Sale will be held at the Grand Western Hotel at 39 Stanley Street, Rockhampton on Tuesday 7th October 2008.

The Sale will feature 17 lots of ridden Quarter Horses, Paint Horses and Australian Stock Horses (some of which have performed and placed in Campdrafting, Reining and Cutting events) as well as two Quarter Horse brood mares and a led Australian Stock Horse gelding.

A special Sale preview will also be held between 8:00am11:00am on the morning of the auction at Cowboy Ranch, which is located just a few kilometres away - and you can view the complete Sale Catalogue (and get maps showing how to get to both locations) by clicking here

Updated 29-Sep-08: You can now also get the pedigrees for all horses in this sale as an Adobe PDF file by clicking here; and you can get the Terms and Conditions of the sale by clicking here

Updated 30-Sep-08: We're pleased to announce that in addition to the Sale, there'll now be a BBQ Buffet dinner available from 5:30pm and an International Rodeo Shootout running after the sale at 7:30pm. You can find out more details by clicking here

Chris Dawson Reined Cow Horse Clinics In Rocky And Capella 29th August To 6th September 2008

16th July 2008: ARCHA are very pleased to announce that our first-ever Reined Cow Horse Clinics will be held in Rockhampton and Capella in Queensland between August 29th and September 6th, 2008.

The clinics are being run by talented reined cowhorseman Chris Dawson, who'll by flying in from Whitesboro, Texas. Chris was the 2007 Reserve World Champion in Junior Working Cowhorse and has won more than US$100,000 in prize monies in his career.

ARCHA originally hoped to be presenting our first Clinic in November last year with the legendary Smoky Pritchard, but that event had to be cancelled at the last minute due to the outbreak of horse flu. However, we're hopeful that Smoky will be able to run a clinic for us in the future.

In the meantime, though, we're genuinely delighted to have Chris with us. And you can find out more about him (and see some great shots of Chris in action!) by clicking here

Update 8th August 2008: You can now get more details about Chris Dawson's three Clinics and a Clinic Registration Form in Adobe PDF format by clicking here. Need more information? Then please phone us on (07) 4933-1866 or send us an email

ARCHA 2008-2009
Show Dates Now Online

15th July 2008: Hello everybody! The horse flu epidemic that erupted in Australia in late September 2007 put everyone in the Australian horse indusry through the toughest 9 months they'd ever had.... including us. But now that everyone's getting back on their feet and things are returning to normal, we're very pleased to say that ARCHA is too.

During the last 9 months we've relocated our offices from Warwick to Rockhampton in central Queensland and we now have a new phone number (which is now displayed on every page of our web site - see the top and bottom of every page).

Today we've released our 2008-2009 Show Dates calendar, which lists all the ARCHA Shows we'll be holding at Rockhampton Austadium between mid-July 20008 and late June 2009, along with some proposed show dates that we hope to be holding at Dalby Showgrounds (which we hope will be confirmed in August), along with live Google maps that will show you how to get to both venues.

And please check back tomorrow for exciting news about our up-coming, long-awaited first-ever Reined Cow Horse Clinic with the incredible Chris Dawson, who'll be flying out from the USA in August to run it.

Equine Flu Outbreak Causes
Cancellation Of ARCHA Events

18th September 2007: We regret to advise that Australia’s Greatest Horse Sale (due to be held in October 2007), the Smoky Pritchard clinic (due to be held in November and December 2007) and the Bobby Ingersoll clinic (due to be held in March 2008) have all had to be cancelled due to the recent outbreak of equine influenza virus in Queensland and NSW.

Australia’s Greatest Horse Sale will now be held in October 2008, and the clinics will be rescheduled to a future time when the industry returns to normal.

ARCHA sincerely apologises for any inconvenience that this has caused.

Dates And Venues For
Smoky Pritchard Clinics Released

29th August 2007: ARCHA is pleased to announce that the dates, venues and costs for the Smoky Pritchard Clinics have now been finalised (see story 14th August 2007)
This clinics will be held on the following dates at the following locations:
24-26 November 2007: Yass, NSW
30 November-02 December 2007: Victoria (venue yet to be determined)
07-09 December 2007: Gatton, QLD
Fees for the 3-day clinic are $700 and participant numbers are strictly limited to 10 per clinic (and all 10 must be ARCHA members). Fence-sitters are also allowed to look on for $50 per day.

Bookings for the clinics are absolutely essential. You can make yours right now by phoning us on (07) 4667-0085 or by emailing us.

New! Expert Training Tips Now On Our Web Site

28th August 2007: Following the enthusiastic subscriber response to our Horse Talk newsletter (the first issue of which will be released shortly), we're very pleased to announce another new feature on our website today: Trainer's Tips.

We've invited leading reined cow horse trainers and sportspeople to contribute their best tips to this new section of our site. And - over time - we hope to grow it into an invaluable resource of hands-on knowledge straight from very best people in the business.

Our inaugural Trainer's Tip comes from Warwick Schiller and deals with how to solve a very common problem: getting your horse to go where you want it to go in competitive riding. The answer is surprisingly simple but it's missed by a lot of riders. You can find out what it is by clicking here.

Smoky Pritchard Reined Horse Clinic Coming In November 2007

14th August 2007: ARCHA are very pleased to announce that former NRCHA President and NRCHA Hall Of Fame member Smoky Pritchard (pictured at right) will be coming to Australia in November 2007 to run our first-ever Reined Cow Horse Clinic.

Smoky has been riding horses ever since he was a boy and has won almost every major Reined Cow Horse award there is to be won. His visit to Australia is a world first for us and we're certain it will be eagerly anticipated by keen reined cow horse sports people right around the country.

Smoky's itinerary is still being drawn up and will be released on our site as soon as it becomes available. In the meantime, you can read more about the man on this page of our website. You can also register your interest in attending the clinic by phoning us on (07) 4667-0085 or by emailing us.

Sign Up For Our New
Horse Talk Newsletter!

30th July 2007: ARCHA are very pleased to be able to offer our web site visitors another new service today: a free subscription to our new Horse Talk email newsletter.

Horse Talk is written by horse people for horse people. It will cover ARCHA events as well as general news of interest to anyone involved with the Australian horse industry.

We plan to release a new issue of Horse Talk every 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the time of year and the amount of news we have to report. It'll be in plain text (so it'll be fast to download no matter what your Net speed is like!) and our stories will be short and to the point (where there's more information on anything we cover, we'll link to it and you can explore those links of you want to dig deeper).

You can subscribe to Horse Talk today by simply entering your email address in the subscription box that now appears on most pages of our site and clicking the "Subscribe" button. Or you can find out more about it by clicking here...

Welcome To The New ARCHA Website!

16th July 2007: We're a little late, but the new ARCHA web site began to appear on the Net today - and you can watch it develop over the next 24 hours as we pour in content to fully flesh it out.

We apologise for the delay in getting everything up and running. ARCHA have big plans for Australian Reined Cow Horses but (life being what it is!) not everything runs to the schedule we'd all prefer.

Watch this spot for further updates as they occur.

17 July 2007: We added three new pages to our web site today:
What Is Reined Cow Horse? (which explains the history of the sport)
A History Of ARCHA (which explains where we come from); and
How To Join ARCHA (which explains how you can join up with us).

18 July 2007: We added another two new pages to our web site today:
Links (which lists lots of great web sites that we're sure will interest Reined Cow Horse enthusiasts) and...
Privacy (which covers the standard material Australian web sites need to cover about how we handle your personal information
We also introduced our easy site navigation today (just click on the header photo of any page in our site to get back to this page).

23 July 2007: After waiting several days to receive full confirmation - and in response to requests from many visitors - today we added our planned
2008 Show Dates to our site. If any of these change, we'll publish an update as soon as we know about it.

24 July 2007: Today we added another new page to our site which contains preliminary information about:
Australia's Greatest Horse Sale which will be held at the Australian Rodeo Heritage Centre in Warwick, Queensland on Friday 26 October 2007. We've also put live links on all the pages of our site to this to save you time if you want to find this page quickly in the future!