About Rancho de las Piedras

It all begin for my wife Sandy and myself in the early fall of 1985. Sandy had met a local contractor by the name of Ed Houston in the City of Thousand Oaks, CA building department while doing some administration work for my construction company.

Ed, who owned more than a dozen Peruvian Paso horses, invited her to attend one of the breed's national shows being held that month in Burbank, California at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center to see the "World's Smoothest Riding Horse" up close and personal. My comment to Sandy when she told me of her invitation was "OK we will go on Sunday, but for only an hour or two, after that, we do something that I want to do". Sunday arrived and we found ourselves in the warm up arena, not only did I see the "World's Smoothest Riding Horse", but I got a chance to ride the current years champion pleasure stallion. That's all it took - I was hooked!

The rest of the story is probably similar to those of other Peruvian Horse aficionados for now we have 18 head including a band of brood mares, riding horses and some up and comers. But here is where our story seems to differ quite a bit. We don't own a stallion! We breed our mares not to a stallion because the price is right (free) or he is convenient (right on the ranch), but because the stallion we select matches and balances the attributes of our mares. Yes, it's more expensive, time consuming and at times aggravating, but the results speak for themselves.

We have been able to breed our mares to National Champion of Champions Breeding Stallions, National Best Gaited Stallions and many other very important and rare sires from all over the United States. At RDLP pheno type is as important as geno type - a good horse is a good horse is a good horse... So if only the very finest Classic Peruvian Horse is what you desire, call us and see what a decade of intense selective breeding has produced.