Who is Monty Roberts?

Monty Roberts is a California horseman born in 1935 whose development of the join-up method — a technique for establishing initial trust with an untouched horse through body language communication rather than force — and whose memoir The Man Who Listens to Horses brought natural horsemanship principles to a global mainstream audience that no previous practitioner had reached. Roberts grew up in the horse world of competitive show and rodeo California, developing his foundational horsemanship skills in a context where force-based methods were the norm, but from early adolescence he was independently developing an alternative approach based on his observation of wild mustangs in the Nevada desert. His observation of the specific body language exchanges through which wild horse herds communicated acceptance and rejection — the lead mare driving a wayward herd member away and then accepting its submission signals and inviting it back — provided the framework for what he would eventually formalize as join-up. Roberts spent decades developing and refining this method on the Flag Is Up Farms in Solvang, California, working with thoroughbred racehorses and demonstrating that horses could be started under saddle quickly and without force. His 1996 memoir The Man Who Listens to Horses became a global bestseller, reaching audiences in dozens of countries and introducing natural horsemanship concepts to millions of readers who had no prior horse background. He has spent subsequent decades conducting demonstrations worldwide, working with horses brought to him by their owners as problem cases, advocating for the elimination of violence in horse training, and building the Join-Up International organization to disseminate his methods through trained practitioners.