Author and ground-breaking trainer Monty Roberts died Saturday at his ranch in California. He was 91.
His best-selling memoir, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” was read by millions of people and made him an international sensation.
The horse-training method he called “Join-Up” involved trust-based communications, detailing a sympathetic way for humans to interact with them. He mentored the late Queen Elizabeth II after she learned of his methods in 1989. They often were photographed together while he worked with her horses.
Monty Roberts at work.
The son of a trainer, Monty started as a stunt double for Elizabeth Taylor and others, while training such actors as James Dean for East of Eden.
But growing up, he saw things he didn’t like in the ways people “training” horses interacted with them.
“My father trained horses in the traditional way, 6,000 years of methods handed down generationally, often violent and rarely fair to the horse. He expected me to follow in his footsteps and so I was also violently disciplined in the only way he knew how, through pain and force. I vowed to seek better methods for my horses.
“I first learned to listen to horses while observing wild mustangs in Nevada at the age of thirteen. Sent there to round up horses for the Salinas Rodeo Association’s Wild Horse Race, I spent hours silently watching the feral horses interact with each other.”
Monty sought an alternative to the rough horse training involving force and fear that he too often witnessed, paving the way to the kinder natural horsemanship approach that is widely favored in this century.
Monty Roberts and Shy Boy, the mustang who died this year at the age of 33.
He believed horses communicated through a language he called “Equus.” By understanding and respectfully using this language in a round pen, he showed that a trainer could invite a horse to voluntarily “join up” and choose partnership with a human.
Monty became known as a “horse whisperer,” a phrase that became the title of a novel which inspired a film of the same name starring Robert Redford.
Through his organization, Join-Up International, based in Solvang, Calif., he promoted his methods, teaching horse owners, trainers, and even corporate leaders about non-adversarial communication.
He is survived by his wife, Pat Roberts; his children, Debbie Roberts Loucks and Laurel Roberts, and “a legacy that forever changed how humanity interacts with the horse.”