Trainer Offers Some Horse Sense to Educators

At 10 minutes after noon, Monte Roberts faced off with a horse with no name.

No one had bothered to christen this young animal because he was incorrigible. He had already pawed and cut one trainer; his hide was crisscrossed with scars from fighting. The son of a feisty stallion, the horse was so aggressive that in his 27 months of life, no one had been able to get close enough to bathe him.

By the time the ringside clock read 12:41, the horse with no name had been “broken,” or as Roberts prefers to call it, “started.” The animal stood by Roberts’ side and allowed the stocky trainer to gently straighten his forelock.

Roberts had taken the wild steed through a series of exercises, culminating with the horse carrying a rider and saddle around the ring, a process that can take three days to more than a week with conventional methods of horse training.

Elapsed time: 31 minutes, one minute over Roberts’ average.

During the last few years, word of Roberts’ technique has spread in the racehorse community, and major thoroughbred breeders from across the country have sent their trainers to learn his method. And some educators in Santa Barbara are looking into the possibilities of applying Roberts’ technique to children.

Frank Taylor, owner of Taylor Made Farms in Kentucky, said Roberts’ method is different from anything he has witnessed.

“It works about a thousand times better,” said Taylor, the largest seller of yearlings in the United States.

Recently, the horse trainers visiting Roberts’ spread in the Santa Ynez Valley have been outnumbered by another group: school administrators, teachers and psychologists.

“This method is actually more effective on young people than on young horses,” Roberts said.

Roberts, 52, first tried the method on his own three children, who are grown now. When friends came to him for advice about their children, Roberts shared what he had learned about teaching an animal--or a child--to “join up” with him rather than oppose him.

Now Santa Barbara County schools are looking into Roberts’ method as a possible device for teachers.

David McCullough, assistant superintendent in charge of educational services for the Santa Barbara schools, said they currently have several psychologists evaluating Roberts’ method.

On Sept. 23, about 175 Santa Barbara area teachers will visit Roberts’ Flag Is Up Farms (the ranch is one of the largest sellers of 2-year-old horses in California) to observe the horseman start a “baby,” as he calls the young horses.

“I’m certainly not a person who knows a lot about horses,” McCullough said, “but it seems to me there could be some ramifications there for working with children.”

Monte Roberts was 9 when Bill Dorence came to see him. Dorence was a rancher who had a spread on a hill overlooking Salinas. The local horsemen thought the old rancher was peculiar.

Roberts listened politely to what the older man had to say, but “none of it made a lick of sense,” he said.

Dorence, who must have sensed a kindred spirit in Roberts, said he had found in working with wild horses that when he cut a horse off from the herd, the horse would flee if Dorence rode toward him. If Dorence rode away, however, the wild animal followed, cautiously.

When Dorence finished explaining what he had learned about animals, he told Roberts: “You’re the one I want to leave this with.”

Over the years, Dorence’s words made more sense to Roberts. He tried the rancher’s technique on a trip to Nevada to round up wild horses for his father to sell to the Salinas rodeo. The advance-and-retreat method worked so well that eventually Roberts was able to coax a wild pony on the range to stand still so he could saddle him.

“How far can I go with this thing?” Roberts wondered.

The problem was, no one had given Dorence’s ideas much credence and now no one believed Roberts. His own father ridiculed his notions about horse training.

Breaking Sessions

So Roberts stopped talking about it, and didn’t mention it again for more than 30 years.

Finally, five breaking seasons ago, a ranch hand peeked over the high wall of the breaking ring. Astonished by what he saw--a green horse broken in a half hour--he told Roberts he had to tell the world about what he was doing.

Roberts didn’t ask people to believe his theories this time; he showed them what he could do. Today, there is a viewing platform all the way around the ring, and Roberts frequently trains with an audience.

Although the method has produced more than 100 stakes horses and four champions for Roberts, he doesn’t claim his is the only way to start a champion racehorse.

“But it’s easier,” he said. “It’s less traumatic. The horse is a happier soul going to work.

“The horse that’s been scared into doing his work, or pained into doing it, will do it and do it well, but given the opportunity to get out of it, he will.”

Normally, Roberts said, thoroughbreds are schooled by negative reinforcement--a bridle jerk to the mouth, a slap on the head, a kick in the belly.

Roberts, standing in the ring with the unnamed horse on a recent day, said: “There’ll be no pain, hopefully not to me, either.” To decrease his chance of getting hurt, he wore tennis shoes for easy maneuverability and removed his watch and glasses.

“He will be curious about me, but frightened of me,” Roberts predicted. “He will flee--horses are flight animals.”

Rather than thwarting an animal’s natural flight response, Roberts encourages it.

When Roberts approached, the horse indeed galloped frantically away along the perimeter of the ring. Roberts kept him running by flicking a light line in the direction of his hoofs. (The line was too light to cause pain to the horse).

When the horse began to tire of running, Roberts assumed an oblique body posture, making himself appear non-threatening. The horse stopped near him. Roberts reached out and lightly touched his nose.

The horse bolted again.

“You wanna go away? Go away,” Roberts said.

Once again, the horse ran itself to exhaustion, then stopped and snorted.

“He has to learn if he goes away he has to work,” Roberts said.

Roberts paced, his tennis shoes sinking deep in the loam. His eyes were averted from the horse; his head was down, like a man beset by a problem. He appeared oblivious to the fact that there was a wild horse in the ring with him. After a bit of this inattention, the horse responded by edging closer.

It was the triumphant moment when the horse sees the trainer as no longer an enemy but an ally, a process known to Roberts as “joining up.”

The horse was saddled by Roberts and ridden by his assistant. A patch of sweat darkened the back of Roberts’ light-blue shirt.

“The most traumatic day in the life of a horse is the day he gets his first saddle and first rider,” Roberts said. “If today was the most traumatic day of this horse’s life, he’ll have a pretty good life.”

Applied to humans, Roberts’ technique is to always offer alternatives, with no fear of pain or punishment. Make it easy for the child or adult to “join up,” to work with you instead of against you, Roberts said.

For instance when one of his sons forgot to water his horse, Roberts told him: You’re free to forget again, but each time you forget, you must water the horse with a water glass. Remembering the chore simply became the more acceptable alternative to filling a huge trough with a small glass.

Roberts said the advance-and-retreat system of training occurs spontaneously in human and animal interactions. It goes on every September in every high school in the land, he said.

Roberts set up the scenario:

A 14-year-old boy falls for a cute new girl in one of his classes. “At lunchtime, he’s there. At recess, he’s there . . . .

“At the end of October he says, ‘The hell with it. She’s never going to notice me.’

“But as sure as God made apples,” Roberts said, “that’s when she does a U-turn and shows up back where he is.”