Remembering ‘The Man Who Listens to Horses’
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This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm David Biancoley. Monty Roberts, the internationally acclaimed horseman who used trust instead of intimidation to train horses, died last week he was ninety one.
He defied the conventional method of breaking horses, something he watched his father do, and created his own gentler approach, known as join up. He based it on the nonverbal language horses used to communicate with each other. It was a language he observed as a teenager, watching wild mustangs in the Sierra Nevada. Roberts was born in Salinas, California in 1935. He grew up around horses, could ride confidently at three, and by the time he was eight said he spent ten hour days working with horses, competing on weekends.
He became a champion rider and was a stunt rider in about a hundred movies, including, as a young boy, the Elizabeth Taylor film National Velvet. He's trained thousands of horses, including wild horses, race horses, and problem horses. Roberts became internationally known after Queen Elizabeth II brought him to work with her horses in 1989. She supported his controversial general approach to horse training, and urged him to write his memoir, The Man Who Listens to Horses, which became a bestseller in 1996. Their thirty year friendship was the subject of the 2023 Andrea Nevins documentary, The Cowboy and the Queen.
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