7th January, 2012 I Wanna Be Like You

I often have a word of the day: prevarication, extrapolation, badinage, that sort of thing. Anthropomorphism is a regular and I think it is a feature of many people's beliefs about horses. Just look at how many films shown over Christmas and the New Year starred talking animals - The Gruffalo's Child, Ratatouille, Shrek, Madagascar and the wonderful classic, The Jungle Book. However, to understand the REAL motivation of animals the new BBC documentary Earthflight is unbeatable. Animals fighting to survive, fighting for food, fighting for sex - and the last two go back to survival. Driven by these three motives alone - the need to stay alive. When working with horses we have to understand that there is a great well of instinctive, automatic, unconscious, behaviour and that we have to draw them up, from this before we can work with counter-intuitive, conscious, trained behaviour (in fact non-natural behaviour). We are lucky that one of the horse's natural instincts is to co-operate but otherwise it is amazing that they will work with us at all given that so much of what we do is against their natural instincts.

When a horse suddenly explodes, takes flight, bites, kicks, bucks...this is all totally natural behaviour. It doesn't mean that he has forgotten everything he has learned just that he has dropped back into that well where he is just a horse. It will take effort to draw him back up. So many "Why does my horse...?" questions involve surprise at totally natural behaviour. The answer can be very succinct: "Because he is a horse". The more complex question is: "How can I ask my horse not to be a horse."

The other danger of anthropomorphism is that it can introduce the idea of moral dimension into a horse's behaviour. Horses have no morals. They don't intrinsically know that a behaviour is 'right' or 'wrong'. They just do what works for them. In a herd environment they learn what works through the actions of other horses. Peechay knows that it is okay to share his mother's food but not Jack's. He is currently working on getting exclusive rights to the contents of the blue barrell. Horses can only learn what is acceptable around humans through actions and the actions of those humans. They don't automatically know. Until then, all they have is their instinct - the drive to survive.

One final thought. What does pain mean to horses? I think there is a huge link between pain and fear in horses. A horse that is in pain is often more spooky, more reactive, nore inclined to bite and kick. The pain itself may be invisible. Pain is a precursor to death in the wild. Animals that are visibly injured, slowing down or acting out of character are picked out by predators and soon become a meal. It is in the interests of the horse to hide pain and to increase their level of vigilance.