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96 SIDELINES FEBRUARY 2011 FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE F O X H U N T I N G

Five Questions for Sibyl Dance

By Lauren R. Giannini

Sibyl Dance grew up in Potomac, Maryland and even though she didn’t hunt as a child, she harks back to riding her pony cross-country. She got into eventing when she moved to Florida in 1980 and wanted to go on with it, but the nearest horse trials were four hours away. A pack of hounds, on the other hand, was only 20 minutes away. In 2006 Sibyl hunted hounds for the frst time, and has carried the horn for two seasons now for Palm Beach Hounds, America’s southernmost hunt. By trade she’s a real estate appraiser, by avocation she’s a huntsman, through and through.

Sidelines: How did you get into hunting?

SD: I went out hunting a couple times with Four Winds and got hooked immediately – I never missed a meet! I hunted one season before I started whipping in and it’s been on and off since 1989, but I whipped in for about 16 seasons. I loved everything about hunting! The hounds – I was immediately drawn to them. I’ve always loved dogs. My grandfather and my uncle were joint-masters a gazillion years ago at Howard County. So hunting is in my family.

Sidelines: Who infuenced you the most as a horseman?

SD: I’ve never really been a ring rider, but one person I worked with quite a bit is Nancy DeSisto, who just moved up to Aiken last summer. Nancy is a great horsewoman who does natural horsemanship. She can read a horse like no one I’ve ever seen. She knows exactly when to put pressure on and exactly when to take it off. I start all my hunt horses – young, old, newborn, whatever age – on the ground, doing the groundwork. I fnd it pays off immensely in the hunt feld in terms of the horse’s confdence. They’ve just got to trust you and go, especially a huntsman’s horse. Nancy has been a great infuence on my horse training skills.

Sidelines: Who infuenced you the most in the hunt feld?

SD: Robert Douglas, huntsman for SouthCreekFoxhounds. He has taught me the ropes as far as hunting the hounds in the feld. He also hunts Florida and some areas are just like ours – a lot of public-owned, fairly wild territory. We have a couple nice big ranches we hunt, but mostly our local territories are wild. He has taught me to read the country – where the foxes and coyotes are most likely to be in the palmetto felds, hunting around the swamps, and tactics that help us to produce the runs.

Also, there’s my overall hunting mentor, Cornelia Henderson. She’s my go-to person for all sorts of questions, everything from stock ties to horses.

Sidelines: What did you learn from whipping in?

SD: Get to know the territory. Ours is tricky and can get really heavy in places, and you’ve got to know, if hounds went in this way, how to get around to the other side. By whipping in, you learn the shortcuts, where you can cross ditches, where you can’t, where you can get through this heavy covert and where you can’t. It takes years of whipping in to learn the territory.

There’s also the hound work and which hound you can trust, knowing who to go with. There are three I trust the

most. Two bitches of our breeding – Yiney (short for Your Royal Highness) and Yaz. Joyful’s a super hound, probably the top bitch in our kennel, drafted to us from Genesee Valley Hunt by Marion Thorne [MFH/huntsman], who has been incredibly generous, sending a number of very nice Crossbred hounds to us: they have great minds and they’re easy to train, eager to please and they have super drive. In fact, Yaz is bred to Angus, to get Genesee Valley in our lines.

Sidelines : Do you have an all-time favorite hunt horse?

SD: Lily. I started hunting her as a four-year-old and actually whipped in off her for a season. She’s unbelievably brave, lovely and forward, confdent, which goes back to that natural horsemanship which is how I started her. I put a year into ground work, trail riding and just bringing her along. Her frst season, Lily was actually under consideration for hunt horse of the year. Even though she’s a draft cross, she’s pretty fast. She’s super comfortable, a great jumper.

Sidelines: What was it like when you frst carried the horn?

SD: I was whipping in and was told on Monday evening that I was hunting hounds on Saturday, opening meet. I didn’t even have time to do a hound walk in that time. But we had three fabulous runs and everyone had a ball and I’ve never had so much fun hunting. I had to get a reeded horn: you just blow into it, it’s like a kazoo. Later I learned to blow a regular hunting horn – the tone is so much more beautiful – there’s no comparison. I went back to whipping in, and two seasons ago, I took over as the professional huntsman for Palm Beach Hounds and hunting took over my life. My husband Jed is the most tolerant man I know.

Sibyl Dance and Lily

Photo by Robyn Monte