AUGUST 8, 2026
Monty Roberts, horseman who developed the "join up" training method, dies at 91
Monty Roberts, the internationally known horseman who pioneered a trust-based approach to horse training he called "join up," died last week at age 91. Roberts, born in Salinas, California, in 1935, spent decades demonstrating that horses could be trained without pain or coercion, basing his method on the nonverbal language he observed wild mustangs using in the Sierra Nevada as a teenager. He became internationally recognized after Queen Elizabeth II invited him to work with her horses in 1989 and later encouraged him to write his memoir, "The Man Who Listens to Horses," which became a best seller in 1996.
Monty Roberts grew up immersed in the horse world of Salinas, California, riding confidently by age 3 and spending 10-hour days with horses by age 8. His father ran a riding school at the Salinas Rodeo and trained horses through pain and physical restraint — a method Roberts later described in a 1997 Fresh Air interview as "you do what I tell you to, or I'll hurt you." That contrast with his father's methods became the defining tension of Roberts's career.
Roberts's own system, which he called "join up," drew on observations he made as a teenager watching wild mustang herds in the Sierra Nevada. He identified that horses communicate using body language — eye contact, the position of shoulders, the direction of movement — and that herd mares use isolation and rejection, rather than physical force, to discipline young horses. Roberts adapted those signals, learning to send a horse away and then invite it back through a shift from an aggressive to a passive posture.
His approach reached a global audience after Queen Elizabeth II invited him to her stables in 1989. The Queen supported what NPR described as his "controversial gentle approach," and the two maintained a friendship of approximately 30 years. Roberts was among the invited guests at her funeral in 2022. His memoir, published in 1996, became an international best seller, and the 2023 documentary "The Cowboy and the Queen," directed by Andrea Nevins, documented that decades-long relationship.