02/08/2026
A sad day indeed.
RIP Monty Roberts. He popularized a method of training horses that sought to focus on how the horse thought and communicated. Given his own upbringing and the brutal horse training culture in which he was raised, this was a monumental shift in thinking, and incredibly admirable for its time. While he was one of many in the American horsemanship community practicing a more empathetic approach alongside forebears like the Dorrance brothers, and contemporaries like Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, and Linda Tellington Jones, he was one of the first to publish books and even have a hollywood movie made that entered the zeitgeist outside of western horsemanship circles and broke into the mainstream. Today we view his work through operant conditioning, nervous system regulation, flooding, and contemporary scientific advances that he simply wasn’t aware of when it was developed, so its easy to denigrate. But I think we should always have respect for people who evolve out of brutality into seeking peace, empathy, and kindness. RIP to the Man Who Listens to Horses.
