The complex world of interspecies communication
Recently, while working with a client, one of my at liberty equine partners walked up to me, stopped and rubbed her head on my leg. And I let her. I let her, even with the old narrative playing out in my mind, that this horse was asserting her dominance over me and, because I didn’t ask her to back out of my space, she was now my de facto leader.
If it were only that simple.
Over the five decades that horses have been in my life, it was the norm to believe that the best way to understand them, or any other species, was through blanket assumptions: If they do this, it automatically means that. And while this may be an engaging and even attractive concept, it doesn’t really make horses, or any non-human animal, easier to care for or help us understand them better. Like humans, non-human animals are just not that simple.
Non-human animals are living breathing beings who live in constantly changing environments, who, like ourselves, show up in these different contexts in a myriad of different ways. For example, sometimes I want to be hugged, sometimes I don’t; some days I want to lead and others, I want to follow and be told what to do. Traditional horsemanship tells us that every equine-human interaction is about leadership. Is every conversation you have with a friend about dominance? Teaching? Helping? Does it mean the same thing every time a friend does a certain behaviour? If we approach our interactions that way, we are missing out on what a true relationship encapsulates: nuance, intuition, intention, connection, mutuality, and deep, full body listening.
What I have learned in these last fifteen years, a time in which I have been intimately connected to horses and have respected them as equine partners, is that we need to consider the full range of possibilities regarding their behaviour, just like we do for a friend. And yes, this is not always easy. We don’t speak the same language, we have different ways of defending ourselves, and we show emotions differently. Most humans, for example, don’t kick each other when they need space. Horses have evolved that way through anatomy and adaptive survival skills. Humans have adapted differently. And by the way, horses actually DO know that we are not horses. They understand that if we kick them it means something different.
It is up to us to look at the totality of all the conditions influencing a horse’s beingness in any particular moment. And we must do so through curiosity and patience. This is for many reasons, but one cannot understate enough that domesticated horses are totally reliant on us – they are not free beings. Automatically thinking that I have surrendered my leadership because a horse has rubbed my leg is a narrow, focused reaction. What if she has a need to be met? Does she have an itchy face? Does she want to connect? Is her nervous system activated? Has the weather changed? Is something wrong with the herd? Is she hungry? What is she feeling / thinking? The bottom line is that a horse’s behaviour is not always a simple cause and effect. Control and trickery may be the last thing the horse is looking for in the wide range of being-to-being interactions.
If I wasn’t comfortable with having her rub her nose on my leg I could have moved away to keep myself safe or asked her to back out of my space. I had that choice. I also had the choice to keep in relationship with her and find out, to the best of my ability, what she really needed.