Tag: Monty Roberts

The day of the midterm elections in the United States, I was reading a book that seemed the furthest thing from American politics. The story of how a man domesticated a wild mustang, after all, stirs the thought to contemplation of wide-open vistas and cowboy chaps, not control of the Senate. “Shy Boy: The Horse That Came in from the Wild” is essentially a plea. Author Monty Roberts has spent his life trying to convince anyone who will listen that the old way of training horses – coercion and fear – is cruel and ineffective. There’s a parable in that, I think. Yes, humans are not horses. But what is the model of action we often see in politics today? In some cases, this is breaking through into actual violence. Then a horse becomes “a willing partner instead of your unwilling subject.” How much of politics today is driven by the willingness to make those holding opposing views “unwilling subjects”? But he never had a thought of giving up, though it took him 80 days to “gentle” the horse.