Prince Harry is to team up with “Horse Whisperer” Monty Roberts to learn more about how working with horses can help veteran soldiers.
The Intelligent Horsemanship guru has a long-established royal connection, having worked with the Queen and her horses for 25 years.
Now Monty is scheduled to meet Harry at the Sandringham Estate to teach him more about the techniques that have been helping veterans overcome post-combat stress.
The Californian horseman told the Evening Standard the prince had expressed an interest in discovering more about his three day programme — called “Horse Sense and Healing” — which uses his well-known join-up method to help US soldiers’ recovery.
Speaking to H&H this month (6 October edition), Monty said his recent experiences working with soldiers had been “10 times” any experience he could ever have had with horses.
“It’s amazing how the principles behind what I do with horses helps military people,” the 81-year-old trainer said.
“The reason it does is because any army you put together, you must wash trust from the participants. They can’t trust anything that they don’t know.
“They can trust their buddy next to them but they cannot trust even a five-year-old girl coming up the road with blood running down her face.
“They lose trust and then they bring them home and they slap them on the back and say ‘thank you for your service — go be a civilian, love your wife, love your children, respect your boss, get a job, goodbye’.
“And typically that’s how they’re put back into civilian life and it doesn’t work.
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“They find they are disturbed by what they went through. And what we can do with horses to build back that trust is just off the charts.”
Monty explained the programme uses horses who are initially wary of the veterans, but through join-up they come to build a mutual bond of trust.
“[That’s how] you begin to get the soldiers back down the road into trusting people,” he added.
