The London Free Press
Friday, 30 September 2005
By Ian Gillespie, Free Press Columnist

The horse is named Bentley. And according to the man with the cowboy hat standing in the middle of the arena, it took tranquillizers, a handful of handlers and about three hours of struggle to get Bentley here.

That’s because Bentley doesn’t like trailers. Or as the man in the hat puts it, “This horse doesn’t just say ‘no’ to trailers. He says, ‘Hell no.’ ”

But now, after spending about 15 minutes with the man yesterday morning, Bentley is walking up a ramp and into a trailer quicker than you can say, “Horseshoes up his backside.”

“Holy moly,” says the man. “It’s too easy.”It looks so easy, in fact, that a cynic might say it’s some kind of trick. They might say that by tomorrow, that trailer-hating horse will back to his old habits.

But the man with the cowboy hat — world-famous horse trainer and best-selling author Monty Roberts — has heard it all before.

“The biggest misconception surrounding me is that it’s a show and it doesn’t translate to real life,” says Roberts. “Some people use the term ‘smoke and mirrors.’ But nothing could be further from the truth.”

Local horse lovers can make up their own minds during the next few days, when Roberts demonstrates daily at the Can-Am Equine International Horse and Trade Show at the Western Fair Agri-plex on Florence Street.

Now 70, Roberts rode his first horse at age three, won his first riding trophy at age four and spent most of his life working as a trainer and competitive rider, winning four world championships and training hundreds of stakes-winning racehorses.

But Roberts was propelled into a larger limelight when his autobiography, The Man Who Listens to Horses, was published in 1996. (Roberts wrote the book at the urging of Queen Elizabeth II, who had invited Roberts to train her equestrian staff.)

That book is widely believed to have inspired The Horse Whisperer, a best-selling novel by Nicholas Evans, later made into a movie starring Robert Redford. Roberts’s newest book, The Horses in My Life, will be released Oct. 8.

Roberts turned the horse world on its head with his controversial training methods — methods that rely on co-operation, reward and trust rather than domination and punishment.

“The more you use pain, force and coercion, the more the horse holds back and tries to fight,” says Roberts. “I will not use violence with any horse, at any time, for any purpose.”

Roberts remains calm and relaxed in the horse ring, relying largely on posture, repetition and positive reinforcement to gently guide the animals.

What’s even more remarkable is how the brutal behaviour of Roberts’s late father Marvin, who was a respected rodeo grounds manager and police lieutenant, prompted his son to forsake force forever.

Roberts says family, friends and doctors accepted his father’s explanations for the boy’s bruises and broken bones.

“There was always the admonition that I was bucked off (a horse), or dragged by a horse, or that I fell off a stack of hay,” he says. “And I did fall off a stack of hay — from the end of his fist.”

Roberts says he is still plagued by injuries that occurred when his father, enraged that the boy was talking to friends instead of digging a ditch, broke a shovel over his back and then beat him with the broken handle, almost severing his left ear.

“My back is destroyed and it was entirely from abuse,” says Roberts. “No horse broke my back, I can assure you.”

Now Roberts is transferring his four-legged methods to two-legged students, as he works with inner-city school children in Birmingham, England.

“Remaining cool and getting out of the punishment business is critical to having an effective relationship with children,” he says. “There’s no such thing as teaching — only learning.”