The Sun and the Moon

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,

When he beats his bars and would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings –

I know why the caged bird sings.                                     

  – "Symphony" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

Six years ago when I met my horse Little Love, she was classified as a true nut case.  This was a horse that hated everybody and everything.  She couldn’t stand to be brushed, she loathed tacking up and riding was definitely the worst thing that ever happened to her.  She was perpetually scared of the world around her and was completely unpredictable under saddle.  When she was in one of her “scared moods”, she would bolt aimlessly around the arena, hauling her owner around like a ragdoll.  She wouldn’t turn right and barely could make a left turn.  Other days, when she was in her “calm mode”, she refused to move and trying to get her to trot was like running in a swamp filled with molasses.  I really think that the only thing that saved her from being taken to the slaughter house at a young age was her incredibly elastic and larger than life movement, which had every trainer in the country swearing they would be the one to “put that horse into its place.”

 

I worked with Little Love for almost five years before she became my horse.  During this time I discovered that she was a misunderstood individual with a lot of opinions, but nobody who would listen to them.  When I started listening, many things changed.  Suddenly she wasn’t so scared.  She also decided it was alright to cooperate with humans, at least some times.  But, her basic nature as a flighty, spooky horse remained the same. 

“You are wasting your time,” people said, when I relentlessly kept working with the black mare despite the challenges we seemed to face on a weekly, if not daily, basis.  “She’ll never calm down.” 

I think it was about three years into it that I admitted that this much was true; Little Love would never change her nervous, skittish ways.  Even though she had calmed down significantly, she still had that frightened horse inside her, and that frightened horse could show up within seconds, if she encountered something scary.  And she was scared of so many things.

Secretly I wished I would be able to own her one day and give her the life I inherently believed she deserved.  Yes, she was a “difficult” horse, but for some inexplicable reason I was willing to live with whatever this brought to the table.  So when, through some luck, that day arrived, I took her out of her familiar environment of a commercial barn with the covered arena and other works and hauled her to a small barn where she could be outside as much as possible.  And not just outside, but outside with another horse.

 She was shell-shocked at first, not knowing what to do with her new life as a horse, but slowly it all sunk in. And as it did, my horse started to change.

Now Little Love lives at a small barn with three other mares.  She still sleeps her nights in a stall, but spends 12- 16 hours of her day outside interacting with other horses.  This is still not perfect, as my dream is to get her into a situation where she no longer would have to live in a stall, but in the meanwhile, her current situation is the best we can get.  And it has made all the difference.  Gone is the crazy horse, the fearful horse, the insecure, skittish animal that took off in the arena over the smallest noise from outside.  In fact, the change has been so profound, so incredible, that if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, it would be hard to believe. 

So, what is it that made the difference?  This is a question I have been thinking of a lot.  I do believe it is the sum of many things, for not only has her living environment changed, but other aspects of her life as well.  She no longer has shoes; she hasn’t had a bit in her mouth for over three years; she rarely gets ridden and never in the arena; she is never forced to do anything; nobody hits her or yells at her.  But, that all put aside, there are two elements to Little Love’s life that seem to make the biggest difference: free movement and the company of her peers. From what I have seen, I truly believe that no amount of riding or human contact can replace either one of these fundamental needs every horse has. 

Two weeks ago I witnessed first hand the importance of free movement and herd life to Little Love’s well-being.  For reasons I’m not going to get into here, she had to be separated from the herd for a short period of time.  I didn’t have the heart to keep her stall bound, so we set up a small paddock close to the other horses.  In fact, to make her feel “comfortable”, we brought her best friend up to the small paddock next to her.  Because of the mandatory electric wire, the two horses couldn’t touch, but at least they could be close to each other.  I was confident Little Love would adjust to this arrangement for a few days.  After all, this was nothing new to Little Love; hadn’t she lived half her life in solitary confinement, at times never getting to go outside?  In comparison, a few days of restricted movement and social life were peanuts.

It took less than 24 hours for my horse to unravel mentally and emotionally.  Suddenly the horse that had been calm and composed, brave and fearless, started exhibiting strange behavior such as staring at objects she had seen for months in the driveway, but which now appeared to stalk her.  She spooked at the neighbor’s dog she had seen daily; the mailboxes on the side of the road caused her to have a fit.  It was impossible to leave the barn area without the mare having a complete meltdown.  She reared, she bucked.  She stopped and refused to move, just to seconds later suddenly spin around and try to canter home.  She was afraid of everything and anything; even the sound of rain drops hitting the bare, leafless trees freaked her out. 

Even thought I had seen it a hundred times before, it actually took me a few moments to recognize this behavior and the message behind it.   But, when I did get it, it hit me on the head like a bag of bricks; Little Love was demonstrating the same behavior I had seen for years, before she was my horse.  This was not a “crazy” horse, this was a horse that had been denied two of her basic needs in life. 

I called the barn owner and discussed other options for Little Love and as soon as we discovered a solution where she was able to be in actual physical contact with other horses and move around freely, she went from crazy to calm within minutes.  In fact, when I saw her face as she approached her friends, I realized that no matter what it took, I would always do my best to make sure she could continue living as part of a herd on a daily basis.  Horses are herd animals and they should never be treated as anything else.  They are also animals that are born to move and they should have this opportunity preferably 24 hours a day.  Living in a stall for 19 hours out of a day just to go outside alone in a postcard-sized paddock is not the life horses are built to live, no matter what people say. 

So many horses are dismissed from our human world as problem horses, but have we ever truly stopped to analyze the reasons these horses act like they do?  Human mishandling issues put aside, how many horses at this moment are suffering from their restricted lives in a small stall, without any hope of ever again having real contact with another member of their species?  I can assure you we are talking of many, many horses.  Perhaps many of them seem alright, even happy (by human standards) for not every horse is a freedom fighter like Little Love who can and will exhibit her opinion about her living conditions to anyone close enough to take notice.  Most horses, in fact, accept their fate and find solace in the dull world of learned helplessness where dissociation from reality saves their life, but eats away their soul.  This works very well for humans, as these horses are valued beyond measure as “kind and calm”.  But, having seen the transformation of my own horse, I can only wonder what lies within all those horses that endure similar, or even worse, living conditions Little Love did.  If we freed all the riding school horses and competitive show horses and race horses to live a more species-appropriate life, what kind of personalities would resurrect from the ruins of these animals?  What sort of lessons of humanity would they be willing to teach us? What kind of aptitude could we discover?   How would this change our relationships with these animals?

The difference in Little Love’s current personality compared to who she was a year ago is like talking about the difference between the sun and the moon.  The sun and the moon are both round and from our perspective they live in the sky.  There are a lot of other similarities as well, but when it comes down to differences, we all know what they are.  Maybe the most striking difference in the way we perceive these two planets is the fact that the sun is always whole whereas the moon can only appear to us in its whole beauty once a month and even then it pales in comparison to the sun’s extraordinary splendor.  That is exactly how I see Little Love when I think of her past life; she looked like the same horse she is now, but it was only very brief moments that I could see glimpses of the real horse within. 

Whereas now that real horse is present all the time. 

And the wisdom and beauty she brings to my world every day takes my breath away.

 ~K

"Caged Bird"

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind  

and floats downstream  

till the current ends

and dips his wing

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and  

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings  

with a fearful trill  

of things unknown  

but longed for still  

and his tune is heard  

on the distant hill  

for the caged bird  

sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams  

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream  

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied  

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings  

with a fearful trill  

of things unknown  

but longed for still  

and his tune is heard  

on the distant hill  

for the caged bird  

sings of freedom.

By Maya Angelou from Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?

Little Love cantering with her friend Col 

The Gift

Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
~William Wordsworth, 1806

Look at the picture above. What do you see?

What you are looking at is a picture of a poster that is for sale for approximately 20 dollars in an American horse catalogue. The text beside the poster says: “The image of an inquisitive muzzle nuzzling a timid, but determined little hand evokes memories of an experience all horse lovers hold in common.”

The name of the poster is “The Gift”, but I am left unsure as to what gift this is referring to; the imprisoned horse giving the girl the gift of the nuzzle or the girl giving the imprisoned horse the gift of touch.

When I was a child, all the horse posters on my walls (and I assure you, there were MANY), illustrated various horses in freedom. I can’t remember one single one with a tacked up horse, let alone a ridden one or one stuck behind bars. Is this what the equestrian world has come to? Is taking the freedom of another living being so “normal” that it is now even depicted in posters for children? The above picture is supposed to evoke “memories of an experience we all hold in common”. I can tell you it definitely evokes my memories. In fact, some of those memories are of experiences from the not so distant past. I remember writing about one of those experiences in my blog (Levels of Imprisonment, August 29, 2010). I wrote: “But if there is a will, there is a way. The only opening to this horse’s box stall is a small gap above his feeder through which the barn worker delivers the daily grain portions. It is just big enough to fit a human hand and a scoop. And a horse’s muzzle. “

I was writing about a gelding who would twist his neck to an unconceivable angle just to get his nose pushed through the feeder hole. And why? To touch another horse.

Here is a picture I took much later of that very same horse. Unfortunately, this time his neighbor's window was closed and the two horses could not touch.  What you see is him reaching out to me.

The similarities to the poster are obvious, but the context completely different. Perhaps my memories are not the memories the catalogue was talking about…

Little Love and I have been gone from her old barn for a mere three weeks, but somehow that short time already feels like a lifetime. At her old barn horses lived in stalls exactly like the one in the poster picture. They rarely were able to touch each other. If it happened, it was an accident or the product of horse ingenuity. Perhaps the top electric wire broke between two pastures or the electricity was left off for a brief moment or a horse managed to get loose from his owner and ran to another horse. Or a horse stuck his nose through his feeder hole. But these were exceptions to the rule. And the rule was no touching.

When we were still there, I did my best to produce the horse to horse touch for Little Love. I know she would have preferred another horse to me as I am a sad replacement, but she took what she could get.

One day not so long ago I was scratching her over the withers, something she loves. As I started rubbing her hard with my fingers, she leaned into me with her nose wiggling. This prompted her new neighbor, a large gelding, to spin around in his stall and stare at me in disbelief. For a moment he merely observed what I was doing, then he took action. He pushed his head against the metal bars that separated his space from Little Love’s. I could see his eyes fix on me. “Come on, rub me, too” he was saying.

I continued rubbing Little Love with one hand as I pushed the fingers of my other hand through the bars. I could just about fit half my hand through. The gelding moved his head and let my fingers scratch over his forehead and nose. Then he positioned his neck to be in line with my hand. So there I stood, scratching Little Love’s withers with my left hand and with my right attempted to reach her neighbor, the big gelding. Both horses stretched their noses out in pleasure and breathed at each other through the bars of the stall.

We are mammals; we all have the need to touch each other and to be touched. Companionship is one of our basic needs, along with eating, drinking, moving and sex. Living in isolation can affect the mental state of any animal, but especially horses, as they are by nature herd animals. Isolation induces stress and a stressed animal cannot learn and train with 100% capacity. Yet ironically it is often the so called performance horses that live in such isolation.

I can now truly see the detriments of forcing an animal to live in a cage. Little Love, the horse that had not had any real horse-to-horse contact for over ten years, has now been going outside with her new friend Col for seven whole days. Due to this fact, she is a changed horse. She is more grounded, more relaxed, more at peace. Yes, she is still coming into a stall at night, but the fact that she can at all times reach over the wall and touch another of her kind, is huge.

I am happy I can finally give her the gift of a social life after all those years of isolation. And there are not a lot of things I enjoy more than watching Little Love interact with her first horse-friend in a decade. Hopefully someday she can give up stall living completely and join a herd living outside, but for the moment, she is visibly content with this small change to her life. In fact, she is so content, that someone could say she doesn’t need me anymore, at least not the way she “needed” me in her previous life. And there is some truth to that, since an imprisoned animal (or person, for that matter) will undoubtedly look forward to any interaction, even if it is with his captor and a member of another species. In that light, can we even pretend to have a real relationship with an animal that is kept in solitary confinement? I have to say that I still feel and hope I had a connection with Little Love before, when she lived a different life. This connection is now evolving and although I definitely have lost something precious (her undivided attention, perhaps?), I have also gained, and continue to gain something else in return, a whole new level of consciousness and connection I never knew about before.

This, I believe, is truly a gift.

~K

If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was.
- Anonymous

PS. There is another major detriment to the stall-bound life: insufficient movement. Horses are born to move and they should be allowed to move, day and night. Movement is what keeps their bodies healthy, starting from their hooves but affecting the joints, muscles and other tissues. A horse kept in a stall does not move enough and is thus prone to injury.

Two horses stretching out to touch each other

I'll Meet You There

People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped. ~Author Unknown

What we see depends mainly on what we look for. ~John Lubbock


What seems like a lifetime ago I pursued my Masters Degree in English Philology at the University of Helsinki. An avid reader since my childhood I had always wondered if my experience of a story was the same experience for every person who read that particular story, no matter where they lived and who they were. Could someone in Africa read Bronte's Wuthering Heights and feel the same way I did?

Common sense told me that each reader would interpret the story from their own backdrop, but what did science say? As it turned out, empirical studies on reader interpretation were extremely rare. This finding merely made me want to know more. So - true to my nature - I decided to embark on my own journey on discovering the answer. The subject of my final thesis was " Literary interpretation and cultural context: An empirical study on women readers from Finland and the United States."

The results were intriguing. In a nutshell, it was possible for readers from two different countries to read the same story (by Raymond Carver, if someone is interested) but experience it completely differently. It was not what happened in the story that was important, it was what people perceived happened that mattered.

And perception is reality.

About a year back I visited a new barn in the area where I live. I sort of found myself there by accident, as I was riding in someone else's car and they wanted to stop and see how the construction at the site was coming along. I had heard people talking about the new place and was fairly sure it was not anything I would be interested in. I was right. Gorgeous as it was, it was just another place humans could trap their horses. The person who had taken me there- let's call her Kathryn- had a completely different view.

"Wow, isn't it gorgeous," she gasped as she looked at the vaulted ceiling, the horse solarium, the pristine tack room, the double sized indoor arena adjacent to the stable. "What horse would not want to live here?"

I could think of several horses.

Kathryn's reaction was a classic example of anthropomorphism i.e. assigning human characteristics to animals and other non-human agents. She was impressed with the lighting in the barn, the large stalls and wide aisles, the warm tack room and the fact that you could walk your horse from the barn to the indoor arena without having to outside - all details a human would appreciate. But a horse? I don't think so. If horses could choose, they would rather live outside in a herd than stay in a cozy (from the human point of view) stable. In fact, many of my friends whose horses live in a place where they can go inside or outside as they please, report that their horse will usually choose to be outside in the elements, even when the weather is less than desirable.

I tried to share my view with Kathryn. She looked at me like I was a crazy person. Which I possibly was - in her world.

But again, perception is reality. Here we were looking at the same thing, but not seeing the same thing. What she thought was horse paradise looked to me like another horse prison. Our horse care belief systems obviously didn't match, not even close. I could certainly argue my point of view (and she could argue hers), but in the end it would have made little difference - we were looking at the same thing through two different lenses. To change either one of our perceptions would have required a significant personal shift in ideology - an impossibility at that time.

Horses more than any other domestic animal seem to be removed from the animal world (dogs do get their fair share of anthropomorphism as well). This fact is perhaps one of the reasons people eventually run into behavioral problems with their horses. Paul Mc Greevy and Andrew McLean write in their newest book Equitation Science that "we might say that a horse is naughty, but we must question whether our notion of human naughtiness can possible apply to horses. Perhaps the naughty horse is merely confused? The problem that then arises is what are we going to do about it? Do we have the right to punish the naughty horse? Clearly, there can be serious welfare problems in attributing human characteristics to horses because of the consequences for them."

We anthropomorphize horses because it works so well. It is convenient for humans to keep them in their stalls covered with blankets and let them out only in solitude and when the weather conditions are great. That is how we would like to live, were we horses. I now believe that this is not what horses want, but once upon a time I was out there at the barn making sure my horse had "everything it could possibly want" (of which, in hindsight, it cared not an inkling about).
For example, I used to be a stickler about keeping my horses clean, because clean horses were happy horses. Thanks to Little Love I have since changed to see this matter differently, but I am aware that this belief lives strong among most equestrians (including her owner). And not just horse people, but ordinary people who know nothing about horses, too. If you took a group of non-equestrians to two separate barns, one where the horses were running around a semi-muddy field in a heard and another where horses were stalled with blankets covering their short, clipped coats, which one do you think the majority would see as humane? I'm fairly confident when I say they would choose the latter barn.

Contained, clean, warm and dry - aren't those the four attributes that make a horse (owner) happy?

I am doing my best to rid myself of the "anthropomorphic lens". Horse are horses are horses. How could I ever think they were something else? How can anyone else still think that? So here I am, as usual, wanting to make sure everyone around me sees the world the way I do. And, if they don't, make sure to judge them for what they are or aren't. But -as I said in an earlier post this month, I am trying to exercise compassion and understanding. I think I need to try harder, we all do. We should all want to understand why and how we can have arguments over things like animal welfare, childrearing, horse training - all subjects I find quite black and white, but am starting to discover have this grey area I cannot even see, having the wrong lens to work with.

My master's thesis proved that people from two relatively similar cultures could interpret an ambiguous short story differently. And culture was not the only thing that determined the differences in interpretation: age, religious background, level of education and previous reading experiences also played a significant role in how readers perceived certain characters and plot turns. My study was not extensive, but it was enough to convince me about the differences in literary interpretation. If written word can have so many meanings, isn't it obvious why we cannot agree on how to be with our horses?

Horse people, too, have different ethical standards, different views of the world. We each have our own individual life history that has shaped us to be who we are, to think the way we think and to value the things we value. We have a certain threshold for pain, for knowledge, for comfort, for courage. We have emotional baggage, psychological baggage and even physiological baggage. We have our own needs, hopes, dreams.

How could we ever look at an image and see the same image?

Perception is reality.

What is your reality? What is the lens through which you are looking at the world? Is this the reality you are comfortable with or would you like to open your eyes a little wider and discover another one, a new lens?

And if you are like me and want to show someone a piece of your reality, what would be the best approach? Perhaps when black and white seem too much of a contrast, it is best to meet in the grey matter?

~ K

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there. ~ Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. ~Richard Brinsley Sheridan

PS. Can you see the baby in the picture?