The Horse Gentler

It is mandated that spouse may not beat spouse, parent will not batter child, and teacher must not spank student.

But they thrash horses, don’t they?

“Unfortunately, they still do,” says Monty Roberts of Solvang, a breeder and trainer who talks to horses, a body linguist who has yet to raise a whip in angry teaching. “Thanks to the SPCA and other concerned organizations, we have come a long way. Certainly to the point where most people think the problem of animal cruelty is over.”

But it isn’t. Not entirely.

Not behind the closed doors of quick-buck guard dog kennels. Not within many circuses, most rodeos and a few equestrian centers where cruel double standards apply and doing unto others is only a human consideration.

Roberts knows of hitting with fists, of kicking and spurring. Training by pain. Whipping, or “firing,” horses to make them frisky for sales. Animals in chains and hobbled; pitiless breaking to build blind, fearful obedience.

“Sadly, when it comes to certain training techniques, the tendency is still that hard training has to be done . . . rough, tough, break ‘em training, like being in the Marine Corps.”

But again, not entirely.

Because there is Roberts. At 62, he has spent half a century privately using, then publicly demonstrating another way--the equine psychology of eye contact, reading the movements of hoof and neck muscles, and understanding the unmistakable semaphore between a man’s squared shoulders and the twitch of a horse’s right ear as it opens to human sounds.

Roberts calls it listening to horses and speaking Equus.

He likes to be known as a horse gentler.

He says he doesn’t break horses, he starts them.

Through trust, respect and negotiation, Roberts routinely will start a wild-eyed stallion to bridle, saddle and rider in about 30 minutes. And if the understanding and conversations continue, the loyalty and mutual regard are forever.

Would, says Roberts, that the horse world had responded so quickly to his methods. But he was denied for decades. Trainers here and overseas were loath to discard their traditional, ungentle ways. Worse, they saw in ex-rodeo rider Roberts a form of California hocus-pocus falling somewhere between Uri Geller and Dr. Dolittle.

Only now, after books and television documentaries and an impressive command performance before Britain’s royal family, has resistance moved aside.

“It is breaking down, and there is more room now for my methods,” Roberts says. “Still, it does hurt to have been so soundly rejected for almost 50 years. . . . On the other hand, people with new theories and different concepts have died without having them proven.

“So you’ve got to know how grateful all this makes me.”

“All this” is the joy of being a cowboy on a global roll.

“The Man Who Listens to Horses,” Roberts’ autobiography recently published by Random House, is on bestseller lists in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. His life has inspired a novel being made into a feature movie. There’s a BBC film, on Roberts’ lone wooing of a mustang from a Nevada herd, that will probably be offered to American networks.

To date, a thousand disciples of his work are speaking and listening to horses around the world. Roberts has started 10,000 new or unruly horses--$36 a day being the going, modest rate if you have a new or unruly horse--and several hundred race winners.

Eight years ago, after magazine articles on his work had reached Buckingham Palace, Roberts was invited to London to meet Queen Elizabeth. From this and subsequent audiences, he started dozens of royal racehorses, many mounts new to the Household Cavalry, and he was sponsored by the queen on a demonstration tour of training stables throughout the United Kingdom.

It was his breakthrough year.

And now the fat corporations--General Motors and Disney, Xerox and AT & T--send executive teams to Roberts’ 200-acre Flag Is Up Ranch, a short trot west of Solvang, to learn how understanding and gentle negotiation beat intimidation and anger in the workplace. Surprise.

As Roberts recently explained to a female interviewer for a London newspaper: “Imagine you are drinking in a bar and I come up and say: ‘OK, you’re coming with me, I will make you do what I want because I am stronger than you.’

“How successful is that going to be? What will I have achieved? Will you ever be as good to me if you are acting out a fear, as if you were in a loving relationship and were pleasing me because it was your choice? It’s the same with horses.”

As it was the same with Roberts, as a child reared on a Salinas ranch by a vicious father--an equal opportunity disciplinarian who beat animals, those he arrested as a peace officer and his young son.

“You hurt them first or they’ll hurt you” was dad’s creed. Young Monty--who by this time already had been a child riding double for Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney in “National Velvet”--thought understanding and nonviolence were better bets.

He argued the point with his dad.

Dad beat him with a 4-foot chain.

As Roberts recalls in his book: “I was left in a pitiful, grieving state. He whipped horses into submission and now he was giving me the same treatment. I felt the same anger and sense of failure that the horse must have felt. As a lesson in how not to win respect and allegiance, it only reinforced a reluctant obedience, instilled fear, and left me with a lifelong sense of resentment.”

At 13, Roberts was a professional horseman, tracking and catching wild rodeo horses in the Nevada high desert. Next, Plains cowboy and national rodeo champion. Then, Hollywood trainer who taught James Dean to handle a rope and look good in cowboy boots for “East of Eden.”

All the time, he was building on a Nevada memory, the indelible sight of a wild dun mare disciplining her rebellious colt. Not by force. But by cutting him from the herd and into loneliness. Pushing him away by standing square, and keeping him away by unflinching eye contact. In the end, head down, the colt moved his tongue and lips, licking and chewing, and asking to be allowed back with the herd.

It convinced Roberts that “every degree of a horse’s movement has a reason. . . . I would learn, much later, while starting horses in a round pen, a rich code of signs and subsigns. Whether I am moving, standing still, facing the horse, or away; all this matters as the horse reads my body language and I read his.

“I can now enumerate about 100 or more signs the horse will respond to, and the vocabulary is still growing.”

This month, as the launch of a national gallop to promote his book, Roberts rounded up the usual suspects--booksellers, celebrities and the media--to display his uncanny horse sense.

He says he sees nothing mystical or spiritual in his work. His audience sees everything gifted and occult in the 28-minute chat between Roberts and an unbridled, unridden yearling.

Roberts speaks to the horse through squared shoulders and his unbroken but soft stare. A slash of his hand says go away. The same movement with open fingers says he really means it.

The horse talks back. Eyes wide for full vision to see everything that is going on. Nostrils flared and snorting, clearing the olfactory system in case danger can be smelled.

Then the colt, conditioned by 60 million years to be a creature of flight, takes flight. Hooves pounding, he sends dirt flying as he canters left around the wooden wall of the round pen. His inside ear is up, open and flat, a small dish listening to all sounds coming from Roberts.

The trainer works with a light sash line, not for hitting the horse but for magnifying hand gestures. And, for the benefit of his audience, there is Roberts’ gentle running commentary:

“My hand is telling him to go away, and he knows that an isolated grazer is a dead horse and he’s not going to be very happy with that. So I’m going to give him a reason to come back to me, to see me as a safety zone.

“Shoulders square. Eye to eye. See, now he’s turning to go the other way and he is saying he wants to negotiate this deal. That ear is still open to listen to me. He’s saying: ‘I give you respect. I don’t know what you’re about, but I give you respect.’

“I’m telling him: ‘For now, I’m calling the shots, until we can form a partnership. You see, I speak your language.’ I can test him by allowing my eyes to drop to his neck. See, he slows. He knows.

“Now he’s licking and chewing. It’s saying something like: ‘I’m a herbivore, I am a grazer, and I am making this eating action with my mouth while considering whether or not to trust you. Help me out with that decision, can you please?’ ”

Roberts does. He moves his eyes back to the yearling’s neck and shoulder and his pace drops again. Back to the eyes and the pace increases. Man and horse are communicating. The horse drops his head, neck muscles relax, and Roberts knows his moment of truth. The horse moves half a stride from the wall. He wants back in.

Roberts angles his shoulders. He is inviting the horse to join him. And his four-legged student does, moving toward Roberts’ shoulder, then nuzzling it.

It has taken eight minutes.

“This is the moment called ‘join-up,’ when he wants to be with me and he comes to me,” Roberts continues. “I rub his head and let him know he is pleasing me, and we will be fully connected. And he has come to me not in confusion, but because he wants to, because he trusts me, because he knows I speak his language.”

The rest, the saddling, the riding, seems elementary.

Except for Roberts. Because every join-up, every communion with a horse of a different personality, endorses his ways.

*

Sure, the critics still yelp.

There are jockeys and trainers with neither time nor tolerance for change. Not when their centuries-old ways also produce obedience and performance.

It’s pride, it’s machismo, it’s ego, Roberts counters.

“It’s all the things that always hinder progress,” he says. “The general attitude is: ‘We’ll do just fine on the methods we know, and when we run into trouble we will call him.’ If they had adopted my methods from the beginning, they wouldn’t have these problem children.”

At the end of the day, however, Roberts hears no detractors.

A keg-chested horseman with a bad back, Roberts has his ranch overlooking several million acres of the Santa Ynez Valley. He has Pat, the teenage sweetheart he married, and three children they have guided to responsible adulthood. There also have been 47 foster children--bulimics, cocaine addicts, the emotionally and sexually abused family the Robertses have taken in and turned around.

And if horses and Roberts’ communication skills were part of that success, so be the broader message.

“My ultimate goal has always been to leave this world a better place for horses. I’ve done that. There are people out there doing my work. So this technique is immortal.

“Life can’t get any better than this.”