This book is the result of years of work with oxen and research into how they were used in the past and are used today. I owe a tremendous amount of credit to my parents Bernard and Kathy Conroy, who allowed me to follow my dream. They never said no when it came to my interests in oxen. They allowed me to raise and train as many oxen as I could afford to feed, despite the many financial struggles they faced. Their physical and moral support were essential in the development of my skills and interest in oxen, and in my eventually putting it all together in this book.
Many other adults guided me through my early years. My first mentors in training oxen were Chester “Punky” Rhodenizer, Rob Gordon, and Jerry Courser. Without their ideas and input I would never have trained my first team.
Showing and pulling oxen as a kid, I learned a great deal from the many 4-H youth and adults who shared my passion. There are too many to name, yet all who shared with me the challenge of competition helped shape my understanding of how to work and train oxen. Many of them to this day continue to provide me with endless ideas, photographic opportunities, and inspiration. These include people like Brian and Kim Patten, Phil Mock, Bob Mock, Dwayne and Faith Anderson, Frank, Pauline and Arthur Scruton, Tim Huppe and family, Les Barden, and the many 4-H club members in New Hampshire who continue to keep the tradition alive.
I owe a great deal to two of my college professors. Dr. Doug Butler, then a faculty member at Northwest Missouri State University, inspired me in 1982 to put down on paper what I knew about oxen. Later, when I was a student at the University of New Hampshire, Professor Dwight Barney pushed me along to finish what I had started in Missouri. Without the intervention of these two men, my interest in oxen, like many childhood hobbies, would have gone no further. Their gentle persuasion resulted in an event that changed my life: the publication of The Oxen Handbook in 1986.
I owe a great deal to Richard “Dick” Roosenberg at Tillers International. Over the last 15 years his ideas and feedback have been critical to making me rethink what I knew about oxen when I wrote The Oxen Handbook. The opportunities he provided me with and the people he introduced me to have shaped my understanding of how oxen are yoked, trained, and used around the world. Dick helped me realize that I could take my interest in oxen to new levels. He and Tillers International have provided opportunities for experimentation and photography that would otherwise have been impossible for me to acquire.
Finally, I owe my wife Janet a lifetime of thanks and certainly more credit than anyone else for helping to further my knowledge about oxen. She put up with the hours, days, weeks, and even months that I was away from home learning about oxen in order to write this new book. Her endless patience and willingness to follow me to ox pulls, ox shows, 4-H meetings, movie shoots, and ox teamster training programs are a mere fraction of what she contributed to this book. My absences while working with oxen in Africa were particularly difficult, yet she never once said anything negative about my pursuit or about the fact that she was the one left doing the farm chores.
She and I have truly worked together in the making of this book. It could never have been written without her. During the last 20 years we raised and trained almost as many teams of oxen. These became the examples that allowed me to make this a work not only of ideas, but also of experiences. Janet’s energy, encouragement, proofreading, and ideas have been my inspiration. For this I would like to dedicate this book to Janet Alma Conroy, my wife, my partner, my lover, and my friend.