The history of the horse-human connection is the history of lessons learned, then forgotten. The kind word seemed always to bow to the harsh; the understanding touch, to the whip, the spur, the jagged bit.
Among the great successes in the world of popular fiction in the mid-1990s was a book about people and horses. Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer sat on bestseller lists for years. And I think I know why.
Here is the story in a nutshell. A magazine editor from New York, Annie Graves, travels to Montana, where she desperately hopes a “whisperer” can heal her teenaged daughter’s horse, Pilgrim, crazed and almost killed after a horrible highway accident. Somehow, Annie intuits, healing the horse is the key to healing her distraught and now partially disabled daughter, even to healing herself.
The whisperer is Tom Booker, a character likely inspired by Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman and Monty Roberts — all of whom the author interviewed. Dorrance even gets a mention in the novel: “He’d told her the other day about an old man called Dorrance from Wallowa County, Oregon, the best horseman Tom had ever met.”
Tom Booker’s cracker-barrel wisdom, his physicality and sensitivity, appear to derive from his life with horses — “the most forgiving creatures God ever made.” In his youth, Tom trained troubled horses without ever charging a cent. “I don’t do it for the people,” he explains. “I do it for the horse.”
Likewise, the real Tom Dorrance talks, not about people with horse problems, but about horses with people problems. It’s a horse-centered way of seeing. Horses, creatures of flight, are extremely sensitive and aware; humans, more inclined to fight, have lost the awareness once essential to survival. The horse can hear the whisper and has much to teach humans about listening. Nicholas Evans had the good sense to be drawn to this territory. Through sales of his book and the film that followed, he has been richly rewarded.
4.3 Monty Roberts with Shy Boy, the mustang he gentled in the high desert of California in 1997. (photo credit 4.3)
The new age of horse schooling naturally has a commercial side. Teachers want to be heard, and thus the multitude of books, manuals, videos and CD-ROMS. If you assembled these gentlers, there would be horse-inspired camaraderie; there would also be territorial tension. Sally Swift on “centered riding,” Richard Shrake on “resistance-free riding,” Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt and Monty Roberts on speaking the horse’s language, Linda Tellington-Jones on the importance of touch — all are different, but as I pondered their books and watched their videos I was struck by what they share.
Many stress the importance of the horse’s body language — lowering the neck and making chewing motions, for example. For Roberts this signals trust, and for Tellington-Jones it does, as well, but she also observes that when a horse lowers his head, his neck relaxes and, as a consequence, he relaxes.
Many of these teachers talk about eye contact: how it can signal aggression. To catch a horse in a paddock, say both Tellington-Jones and Shrake, you approach him quietly, talk softly and look at the ground. These horse-wise experts often choose the same metaphor: riding as a dance, with one partner leading and one following. They calm a horse by patting a spot by the withers, right where a mare would nuzzle her foal. The Tellington-Jones method of touching the horse (sometimes vigorously around or inside the nose or mouth and making circles on the horse’s face) seems a more elaborate version of something Indian horse breakers practiced a century or more ago.
In August of 1997, I watched Monty Roberts “start” (he loathes the word “break”) three young horses at two different demonstrations in Toronto. I knew what to expect when he climbed into a fifty-foot round pen at Sunnybrook, the oldest stable in the city, in a park set deep in the heavily treed valley that meanders through the metropolis. I had seen Monty school a mustang in the desert, had seen film of him working in a round pen, but I had never actually seen him, in the flesh, perform that thirty-minute miracle he can lay claim to.
Dr. William O. Reed had. The dean of North American track veterinarians, and a New York-based surgeon with a Kentucky horse farm of his own called Mare Haven, Dr. Reed has worked during his illustrious career on many of the finest Thoroughbreds in the world — horses such as Ruffian, Northern Dancer and Secretariat. He watched Monty Roberts work in a round pen with an unbroken horse in December 1995 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, or horse veterinarians, in Lexington, Kentucky, the virtual hub of the world’s Thoroughbred horse industry. He vividly remembers that day. “I thought it was the greatest communication between man and animal I had ever seen,” he told me.
In Toronto, Monty, a squarely built man with a linebacker’s body (240 pounds on a five-foot-ten-inch frame), began by talking into a microphone outside the ring. His preamble prepared the onlookers — journalists and booksellers this time — for what they were about to see. At heart, it is quite simple.
When he was a teenager, Monty rode in the wilderness of Nevada for weeks at a time, rounding up mustangs for rodeos. On his belly, peering through binoculars, he would spend hours watching a herd. Monty reasoned that if he could learn how horses communicate with one another, he could better communicate with them.
One day he saw an older mare discipline a colt not quite two years old and full of himself. Full of mischief is more like it. Monty had observed that while the stallion protects the herd, the lead mare runs it on a day-to-day basis. If the herd were a school, the stallion would be the principal and the mare would be the vice-principal. Like an unruly pupil, this colt was kicking mares and biting foals. After the fourth infraction, the mare had had enough. She flew at him, knocked him down once, then again, and finally drove him from the herd.
The isolated colt’s every attempt to rejoin the herd was repulsed and he clearly felt panic. When he was eventually let back in, the mare fussed over him, grooming him extensively. When he reoffended he was again expelled, and pretty soon he would leave the herd of his own volition, like a child retreating to his room after a temper tantrum. By the end of four days, the colt was agreeably grooming so many other horses he had almost become a nuisance.
The language of horses, Monty learned, is a body language — “primitive, precise and easy to read.” When the mare squared her body and stared at the colt, that meant “Keep out!” When the colt made chewing motions and lowered his head, seeking forgiveness, that meant “Let me in!” Monty calls the language “Equus,” and his singular contribution has been to codify its grammar: to tell us that when a horse does this with his body it means something quite specific, and when a human does that with his body in response it, too, conveys a particular message to the horse.
It is a silent communication between human and horse, and though Monty wears a lapel microphone during demonstrations so he can explain as he goes, the horse pays little heed to his voice (which remains, I should add, even and calm). Equus is mostly about eye contact and body angles. After starting ten thousand horses this way, Monty enters the ring with confidence. It always works. But he is also a showman, and part of the drama of these demonstrations derives from the horse — all that power, all that unpredictability. In his preamble, Monty accentuates the risk.
Outside, that overcast day in Toronto, stood frisky proof. A fifteen-hand chestnut named Happy Go Lucky, a Trakehner-Thoroughbred cross, anxiously eyed the people milling nearby. “He’s a little stubborn,” his handler told me, “but he’s very manageable.”
In the round pen, Monty introduced himself to Happy Go Lucky, and rubbed the horse’s forehead often as he talked. Monty said he aimed to accomplish in thirty minutes what traditional horse breaking requires five to six weeks to do: introduce the horse to bridle, saddle and rider. He flicked a light cotton line at the horse to send him round and round the perimeter. “Don’t go away a little,” he told the horse. “Go away a lot.” We got a sense of the gelding’s speed and power as he kicked up the turf on his turns. Onlookers were peering through a grid-metal fence, only feet away. We could feel
the rush of wind as he passed, see his wide eyes, hear his loud breathing.
But this horse was indeed manageable. He soon learned to respect, but not fear, the tossed line. Monty, in essence, put the horse to work by making him trot around the pen.
The alternative to work, Happy Go Lucky soon gathered, was conversation. Monty gave us what he imagined were the horse’s thoughts — that “this man with the belly” seemed not so bad after all. The key “signs” then came, one after the other: the horse, still circling, locked one ear on Monty (the other ear continued monitoring the crowd), then stuck out his tongue and made chewing motions; finally, he lowered his head until it was inches from the ground. Like the colt in the high desert to the mare, he was saying, “Can we talk?”
Monty then angled his shoulders away from the horse, even turned his back to him. Happy Go Lucky, still somewhat skeptical, delicately approached. The horse was alone and thus fearful, for to be alone is to be exposed to predators. (Observers of wild-horse herds point out that stallions who lose their harems and must live alone quickly die. The solitude invites stress, disease in turn, then death. This is only one measure of the horse’s powerful herd instinct, an instinct that Monty harnesses in the ring.)
Happy Go Lucky wanted to join a herd. By this point, Monty’s herd looked a good bet, since Monty had done nothing to harm him. In fact, getting stroked on the forehead began to seem a better choice than the “work” of all those trips around the perimeter. Slowly, the horse stepped toward Monty’s back and nuzzled him, even followed Monty as he turned left, then right. Monty calls this “join-up.”
The subsequent bridling seemed to me astonishingly easy: how would you respond to a stranger putting a leather contraption on your head with a metal piece that fits inside your mouth? The saddle was also accepted with good grace, and then came some serious bucking. Monty looked on, unconcerned. Later, when a TV camera clacked, Happy Go Lucky spooked and instinctively sought Monty. In that sudden storm Monty was the nearest port.
When a young rider eased his body across Happy Go Lucky’s saddle, much as Indian horse breakers used to do, the horse abided this. Neither did he complain when the rider got a leg over and put both feet in the stirrups. “In traditional schooling, the horse bucks the rider 95 percent of the time,” Monty told us. “Ninety-five percent of horses started the way we have today do not buck. We’ve turned the stats around.”
Monty knows when to make eye contact with an unbroken horse and when not to, where to touch the horse first, whether to move slowly or quickly. All this he knows because he has learned his equine manners and grammar. He rejects the label “horse whisperer” as distasteful and inaccurate. The term implies somehow that his skill owes something to his “touch” or to his Cherokee ancestry. Monty Roberts is no whisperer; he is a teacher. And in time, he says, we could all learn what he knows.
The next night, at the York Equestrian Centre north of Toronto, Monty did the same thing with two other horses, the second a princely and fiery dark gray colt by Abdullah, a Trakehner stallion who won both gold and silver medals in show jumping for the U.S. at the 1984 Olympics and two world championships after that. The huge arena drew one thousand people, the biggest crowd in all the years that Monty Roberts has done demonstrations.
Well into the evening, Monty offered a little lesson in the importance of eye contact with the two-year-old pureblood Trakehner called Abdullar. He told us what would happen and where, and he was as good as his word. As Abdullar circled past an appointed spot on the perimeter, Monty dropped his gaze to the horse’s hips and the horse actually stopped. Stopped dead. When Monty quickly returned his eyes to the horse’s eyes, the horse picked up the canter again. There was a little gasp from the audience. “Eyes on eyes, he flees,” said Monty. “Eyes on hips, he stops. I’m here to tell you that a horse can see your eyes from half a mile away.”
I was left doubly impressed. First, I was struck by the intelligence of these horses. You could almost see their minds working as they made conscious decisions about when or if to approach this stranger. I also sensed how powerful was the horse’s language and how strong the compulsion to be social. “His own language is taking over,” Monty told us, “and he’s got to comply.”
Not shy about extolling his achievement, Monty reminded his audience of what could go wrong. A young horse might eye his first rider, Monty said, and believe him to be a predator. True enough, but the predator in this case was a laid-back, gum-chewing, black-hatted Idaho cowboy. Still, the horse is wary, and the gentler had better be also. In New York only days before, a particularly feisty horse had tried to kick Monty innumerable times, and had actually bitten him three times. Monty’s son Marty, who was in the audience that night, later told me he began to fear for his father’s safety. But Monty persisted and eventually gentled the horse, and the Bronx audience rewarded him with a standing ovation. We did the same in Toronto.
Three green horses brought to bridle, saddle and rider in ninety minutes. Not a harsh word spoken, not a hand raised in anger. That other Monte, who “rode down the gray,” would have been impressed.
“Hurt the horse,” Marvin E. Roberts told his young son Monty, “before the horse hurts you.” Where did that fear of horses come from? Maybe from stories like this one.
Cowboy accounts of roping mustang stallions may have been overstated, but the spirit of truth in them leaves a chill. “Probably no more vicious animal lives than a mustang stallion,” wrote one nineteenth-century mustanger named Frank Collinson. “He bites, strikes with his forefeet, kicks, tries to jump on you or kill you in any way he can. He is the most dangerous animal I have ever had anything to do with.”
Collinson describes how he tried to capture a big sorrel stallion, how the roped horse turned on him and severely bit his leg. He vividly remembers the sound of the stallion’s teeth when they slid off his thigh, clacking “like a sprung steel trap.” The horse was not dissuaded by a warning pistol shot but used the rope to jerk his assailant’s horse to the ground, then rushed him at full gallop — “with his mouth open and ears set back and eyes like balls of fire.” Bullets from a friend’s Winchester felled the stallion, but only a few feet from the man standing with his own mouth open and his boot full of blood.
While Margaret Cabell Self was penning her quite sympathetic book on horses, Marvin E. Roberts was writing his. Horse and Horsemen Training displays a black-and-white photograph of the necessary bits and halters and ropes, the latter, though new, clearly stained with blood.
For the bucking horse, urged Roberts Sr., fill a burlap sack with tin cans and attach it to his saddle — a little terror to let the bronc know who’s boss. When a horse refuses to leave the herd (called “herd-bound”), “put your left hand on the saddle horn and hit him on the top of the neck right up between the ears as hard as you can.” Where to hit, what to use and when (“some colts have to be hit more than others”) are all in the little blue book.
Roberts Sr. professed to love his horses, and in his own eyes he did. His thoughts on curbing and disciplining horses seem in keeping with the time. No one branded him cruel. On the contrary, for the gift of his horsemanship (he taught many local children to ride), the grateful citizens of Monterey, California, named a rodeo arena after him.
Traditional “sacking out” was as much war on the horse’s mind as on his body. The aim was to sap his resistance. Monty would watch his father take three weeks to break six horses. They were haltered and tied with rope to posts laid thirty feet apart around the corral. Then weighted sacks or tarpaulins were fitted over them and tightened with more heavy rope. The horses fought this, of course, bloodying and often hurting themselves.
In the wild the mountain lion often preyed on mustangs. The cat would leap from a tree onto the horse’s back, clinging with its front paws and attempting to disembowel the horse by raking his flank. Some horses managed to buck the lion off but often bore the scars; any bronc-buster seeing such scars on a horse wisely gave him a pass — hence th
e expression to “pass the buck.” The nineteenth-century cowboys who witnessed the ferocious bucking by mustangs whenever anything was put on their backs guessed that the fear was inherited. Thus, a weighted sack or saddle inspired in a horse an ancient and deep-seated terror.
Though some horse breakers were cruel, just as some people are, the cowboys I have met are anything but. Ranchers likely saw sacking out as the only option, and an efficient one at that. Cutting horses work so hard that their working lives are correspondingly short. Ranches, then, needed great numbers of horses for cattle drives and general ranch duty. Since gentling had no champion, the rough methods of the bronc-busters — professionals who went from ranch to ranch charging $5 a head — prevailed.
As part of sacking out, one hind leg was tied up with ropes and connected to a rope collar around the horse’s chest. With the horse’s foot off the ground, bucking was impossible. More sacking out ensued, and finally a saddle was put on. The end result may well have been a cooperative horse, but something precious, Monty Roberts came to believe, had been lost.
Great trainers, such as Ian Millar in the show-jumping world, talk about a horse’s generosity. It is a great gift often wasted. Millar once had a horse, a fine jumper prone to nervousness and pacing in his stall. A previous owner had been too free with the use of a crop and the well of generosity was not as deep as it might have been.
Generosity means that the horse will do something extra, but only for you, his trainer and rider. “It never ceases to amaze me what a horse can give,” says Jim Elder, another Canadian show jumper and an Olympic champion. “You’ll be in a tight corner or moving at speed, and you think — it’s so difficult the horse can’t do this next jump. But he does!”
Wild About Horses Page 10
