With world-renowned horse whisperer Monty Roberts set to showcase his revolutionary methods for breaking horses at the Cavan Equestrian Centre, Damien O'Reilly caught up with him ahead of time at the RACE Academy for trainee jockeys in Kildare. Monty's first point of business is to stop us using the word 'break' at all.
"I hate the word 'break'… In the stud farm, they all have the breaking pen, not mine. ‘Starting’ I call it, or ‘communication’, but not ‘breaking’. I don't break down their spirit. I cause a partnership. Remember that a good trainer can make a horse do almost anything he wants him to, but the great trainer can cause the horse to want to do it, and you stop, you think about your own life and would you do your work better if you went to work because you wanted to than because you felt you had to?"
When asked how his method differs from the conventional one, Monty says, for one, he takes violence completely out of the equation.
"They get nervous, the traditional horsemen, to say, I just want this horse to race and win so I want to do what we already know will work but if they stop and think about it, if that horse went over there and wanted to win, you're more apt to win so my methods do work but it'll take a long time. It'll take the next generation and maybe more before they really realise the difference is I don't strike the horse for pain, I don't yank the horse for pain, there's no tying the horse up… I want the horse to want to come to me and then we make a deal and it's a regular set of circumstances that we go through and the horse says, I'll do this because it seems good."
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