Kelty Johnson makes a living doing something most people only daydream about when they’re stuck at a desk. She trains horses, and she works with people one-on-one, using horses as the bridge. It is not the kind of career you choose because it pencils out neatly. As she puts it, you have to really love it.

We invited her onto the Utah Stories podcast to get a clearer look inside that world — the work, the philosophy, and the reality behind the romantic idea of “working with horses.”

Her days are split between barns, moving from horse to horse depending on what’s on the schedule. Sometimes that means giving an animal a focused, disciplined session so it’s “nice and chill” when the owner arrives later. Other times, it means coaching both the owner and the horse together. Horses can learn new habits quickly, she says, but they can fall back into old ones just as fast if the human side of the partnership isn’t part of the training.

And then there is the other part of Kelty’s work, the part that tends to stop people mid-sentence when they hear about it. Equine therapy, she calls it, although what she really describes is something simpler and harder to fake: a horse as a living mirror.

“Horses are primarily nonverbal communicators,” Kelty says. People transmit more emotion nonverbally than they realize. A kid can walk into a barn and insist they’re fine. Their shoulders, their breathing, their eyes, and their tiny pauses between words might say otherwise. The horse notices.

Kelty describes horses as “biofeedback machines,” not in the trendy wellness way, but in the blunt, practical way you would describe an animal built to survive by reading the world accurately. Horses evolved as herd animals, always monitoring the environment for danger. If you are tense, distracted, fearful, or emotionally flooded, the horse often responds before you can form a sentence about it. The horse does not argue with your words. The horse reacts to what your body is broadcasting.

That is where the work starts.

A lot of therapy depends on language, and language can be a wall. Kids especially get good at saying “I’m fine” even when they are not fine. Adults are not much better, just more practiced. Kelty says the horse helps because the horse is not asking you to perform. It does not need you to be entertaining, articulate, or even confident. It needs you to be present.

Horses force presence in a way phones never will. If you are not present around a thousand-pound animal, you are at risk. Kelty points out that nervousness around horses is normal self-preservation. People sometimes act embarrassed about fear, as if fear is a character flaw. In a barn, fear is information. It is something to notice, not something to hide.

A horse also gives what Kelty calls a neutral presence. Around humans, we tend to fill silence with talking. We try to manage how we are perceived. With a horse, you can stand there and breathe and nothing about the moment requires you to impress anyone. The horse is simply there. That can be strangely disarming for someone who has lived in fight-or-flight for a long time.

And that neutrality opensdoors.

One story she shares, with permission, involves her cousin’s son, about three years old at the time. He had been working with a speech therapist and was mostly nonverbal. Kelty is careful not to claim she “fixed” anything. In her view, her job is to facilitate the interaction and make it safe. The connection does what it does.

The horse’s name was Sun Chaser. Something about being around that horse changed the boy’s willingness to speak. He started talking more, first to the horse, and then “all the time,” including with people. It was not a lecture or a worksheet or a reward chart. It was a relationship that felt non-threatening enough for language to come out.

However, not every kid responds tremendously well to horses. Some do. Some don’t. That is okay. One should not rush it.

Kelty worked for five years at a residential treatment center, and she remembers one kid where progress looked like almost nothing to an outsider. For a couple of months, the best they could do was spend time on the ground with the horse. No riding. No pressure. Just being near the animal. Eventually, the kid felt comfortable enough to pet the horse. They took it slow. Later, he wanted to ride. Eventually, he chose to volunteer at the barn in his free time.

But even a horse can have a bad day. When that happens, she starts with the least dramatic explanation. Is something causing pain or discomfort? Is the tack fitting right? Is there something physical going on, like ulcers? If the horse is in real distress, that might mean calling a vet. Only after you filter out pain and equipment problems do you move on to training.

Then, instead of fighting the horse into compliance, she looks for a task the horse can do and do well. She regresses the training, lets the horse succeed, and then builds forward. “Once they’re with you,” she says, “then you can push them to the next level.”

It sounds like good horsemanship. It also sounds like good parenting, and good leadership, and frankly good humaning.

Kelty learned this world the hard way, not the wealthy-kid-with-a-trainer way.

She did not grow up with horses. She was just “horse crazy,” the kind of kid who finds a way. When her mom married a man with some cattle in lower Provo, Kelty saved up $300 and bought what they called a “slaughter horse,” meaning a horse on its way to slaughter. She was 11. She rode that horse for a couple years. When the marriage ended, Kelty still took the bus from upper Provo to lower Provo with a little saddle on her back. It took about an hour and a half. She went anyway. She never stopped riding.

Why horses? Kelty doesn’t dress it up. She struggled as a kid, not in a diagnosable way, but in the way lots of kids struggle quietly. Horses gave her a presence that felt therapeutic, even if she didn’t have that word for it yet. “Everything else was more manageable in life when I had horse time,” she says.

For a while, she thought she might take a different path. She studied clinical psychology in grad school in Chicago. But she kept finding herself back in the horse world, doing horse jobs in different ways. She worked at an equine therapy center in Chicago. More recently, she did film work and brought horses onto a set. She also worked on stage at Tuacahn, where the glamorous part was limited. Mostly, she was feeding and mucking, which is honest work and also a reminder that in the horse world, there is no separating the spiritual from the practical. If you want the connection, you also get the manure.

There is a moment in the conversation where Kelty gives the most accurate description of becoming a rider that you will ever hear. “You have to be okay with dealing with fear,” she says, “because only one of you gets to freak out at a time and it’s never your turn. It’s always the horse’s turn.”

Horses are not machines. They are sensitive, social beings. Kelty believes they enjoy interaction, and that they can find gratification in work when it is done well. They want to be good at their job. A good trainer sets them up to feel that satisfaction.

But the horse world also has a barrier most Utah families feel immediately: cost.

Kelty doesn’t sugarcoat it. Cost of hay has tripled over her lifetime. A bale is about $14 right now. An average horse is around 1,000 to 1,200 pounds and needs about 2 percent of its body weight a day in roughage. Just the cost of roughage alone, she estimates, is about $130 a month, and that is before supplements. Boarding in Utah County and Salt Lake County is usually at least $500 a month. A lot of that is feed, but it also includes labor, stalls, and someone there in case of emergency.

If you have ever looked at a horse standing in a field in West Valley like a lawn ornament and wondered what the deal is, the deal is that people love them and also that they cost money every day, whether you ride or not.

So Kelty built something practical.

She created a website called Haypartner. Her goal is not to make money. She built it as a resource for families because she gets stopped all the time by parents saying, “My kid wants to ride.” The horse industry, she says, is full of places that pop up and shutter a couple years later. She wanted a list of larger operations and opportunities that are verifiable, organized by categories like equine therapy, trail rides, and lessons.

She also points out that connecting kids with horses does not have to mean traditional riding lessons with a big monthly bill.

Utah has vaulting clubs, which is basically gymnastics or dance on horseback and can be a gentler introduction. There are 4-H clubs that are free. There are pony rides at places like Heritage Park or Thanksgiving Point. In other words, the first step does not have to be buying a horse. It can be getting near one, safely, enough times for the kid to learn what their body does around an animal that reads the truth.

The conversation drifts, as Utah Stories conversations often do, into the West itself. Rodeos come up. Kelty acknowledges they can be controversial, but she notes something that many urbanites quietly admit: for a lot of people, rodeos are one of the only remaining ways to engage with horses at all.

Then the question of mustangs arises.

Kelty says she’s not well-versed in the policy details, but her instincts are clear. Adoption programs are good. Mustangs get a bad rap. She’s worked with mustangs that are fantastic horses. They can be good riding horses, although she cautions they are not for amateur trainers because they can be “hotter” on the breed scale. She calls mustangs part of our heritage, and she hopes we can keep the herds with enough space.