Monty Roberts, the American horseman famed worldwide as the “horse whisperer” for pioneering a gentler, trust-based approach to training horses, died on Saturday, August 1, at his Flag Is Up Farms ranch in Solvang, California. He was 91. His daughter, Debbie Roberts Loucks, confirmed the cause of death as complications from an autoimmune disease.
From Child Stuntman to Horse Whisperer
Roberts began working with horses almost from infancy, performing as a child stunt rider from the age of four and later winning multiple rodeo competitions. As a teenager, he was sent to Nevada to help round up wild mustangs for a rodeo association, and it was there, watching feral horses interact silently among themselves, that he developed the foundations of his training philosophy.
He described his father as a traditional trainer who used violent, generations-old methods and disciplined him the same way, which drove Roberts to seek a non-violent alternative for both horses and people. He came to believe horses communicate through a body-language system he called “Equus,” and built on this to create his signature “Join-Up” method, a round-pen technique in which a horse is invited to voluntarily choose partnership with a human rather than being forced into submission.
A Sharp Eye for Bloodstock
Beyond training, Roberts proved a shrewd judge of horseflesh. At the Keeneland sales, he bought a yearling that had failed to meet its reserve for just $40,000, then resold the colt a year later for a sale-topping $175,000. That horse went on to race as Alleged, who won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in both 1977 and 1978 under trainer Vincent O’Brien.
Roberts also rehabilitated the German champion Lomitas, a colt so unmanageable he had once been banned from competition after throwing himself to the ground before the German 2,000 Guineas. After Roberts intervened at owner Walther Jacobs’s request, Lomitas won the Grosser Preis von Berlin, Grosser Preis von Baden and Preis von Europa, was named Germany’s Horse of the Year, and was rated the third-best three-year-old in Europe.
Friendship With Queen Elizabeth II
Roberts’s methods reached Queen Elizabeth II through equestrian magazine articles in the late 1980s. In April 1989, she invited him to Windsor to demonstrate his techniques in person, and was so impressed that she drew him into her royal circle as an adviser and friend for the next three decades. Over that period the pair met more than 200 times and spoke by phone just as often, exchanging handwritten letters and annual Christmas greetings.
The Queen personally urged Roberts to write about his methods, reportedly telling him, “There must be a book. It should be published in as many countries and languages as possible”. The resulting memoir, “The Man Who Listens to Horses,” was published in 1996 and has since sold more than six million copies worldwide. Roberts attended the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations at Windsor Castle in 2002 and was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 2011 for services to her racing establishment. Following her death in 2022, he was invited to her funeral at St George’s Chapel; their unlikely bond was later chronicled in the documentary “The Cowboy and the Queen“.
Hollywood Ties and Advocacy Work
Roberts’s connection to Hollywood predated his royal friendship: he coached actor James Dean on riding for “East of Eden” and served as a stunt double for Elizabeth Taylor when she was injured filming “National Velvet”. His life story also inspired the novel and Robert Redford film “The Horse Whisperer“. Through his organization, Join-Up International, based in Solvang, he later taught his non-adversarial communication techniques to horse owners, trainers, and even corporate leaders.
He was also an outspoken opponent of whip use in racing, once writing that “the best jockeys would still be the best jockeys, and in fact, true horsemanship skills would come to the front if we were to eliminate whipping”, and separately stating: “One day it’ll all be whip-free, because we’re brighter than that. Whipping a flight animal to make it run faster is stupid. It can’t be right“.
Roberts is survived by his wife, Pat Roberts, and his children, Debbie Roberts Loucks and Laurel Roberts. Ilka Gansera-Leveque, now a Newmarket-based trainer who worked at his farm early in her career, remembered him as “a cowboy, a regular, down-to-earth, straight-shooting kind of guy. It was all about the horse for him”.
