The Power of the Herd (15 page)

While Rashid calls this quieter style of herd management
passive leadership,
the term doesn't quite fit a horse like Shadowfax. Though he was eventually gelded as a form of birth control, the still-spirited yet poised Appaloosa continued to insist on a certain level of respect and deference: He didn't hesitate to up the ante when someone challenged his authority. Over time, I began referring to him as a
mature alpha,
a horse with the natural energy and inclination to assert dominance while also demonstrating restraint and concern for the well-being of others, one who balanced individual needs and group needs, using the least possible amount of friction or violence. After all, stallions who spend a good part of the afternoon beating each other up at the water tank are that much slower, and lamer, when running from a predator who's been lounging in the sun all day.

Conserving energy in this way may not seem like a vital survival issue for domesticated horses and civilized humans, but it's actually an important element in any successful endeavor. Businesses with significant internal strife have trouble
doing
business. Temperamental film directors go over budget and fall behind schedule. Bands of moody rock musicians break up at the height of their popularity. Politicians who inflame and manipulate public sentiments have trouble passing effective legislation. And horses who spook at every little thing lose in the show arena.

The good news is that while dominance and aggression may be hard-to-break habits, they're not necessarily hardwired. Primatologists have found that a lesser-known species of ape, the bonobo, can claim just as much kinship to humans as the chimp. Yet the bonobo prefers cooperative, conciliatory behavior; the females generally step forward to greet potential rivals with affectionate, peacemaking gestures and will often interpose themselves between males escalating toward a fight. Zoologist Frans de Waal calls it
“survival of the kindest.”

Even baboons, known for intensely aggressive behavior, seem to have less of a gene for dominance than a persistent custom of it. When the notoriously hostile alphas of a Kenya-based troop claimed, as usual, first dibs on the food, in this case a pile of garbage, they promptly died off from a nasty dose of tainted meat. The surviving low-ranking males, females, and children subsequently underwent what
New York Times
science writer Natalie Angier characterized as
“a cultural swing toward pacifism
, a relaxing of the unusually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites.” The shift has persisted for two decades now. Even new males entering the group adhere to the unspoken guidelines of this gentler baboon subculture.

In his book
Field Notes on the Compassionate Life,
Marc Ian Barasch joins scientists like de Waal in speculating that
“if bonobos instead of chimps had been taken
as the prehuman model, the killer-ape crowd would never have gotten such traction. The scientific premise about our primate inheritance — and hence our modern assumptions about our basic nature — might have stressed equality of the sexes, familial bonds, and peacemaking rather than male dominance hierarchies and naked aggression.”

Yet science itself may have been going through its own fretful adolescence when it latched onto examples in nature to justify our culture's penchant for conquest, competition, and dominion over all the earth's creatures. Since the equestrian arts were originally perfected for the ultimate dominance tactic — namely, war — horsemanship has also, at times, suffered from the same prejudicial perspective. In war, no one is exempt from being treated as a means to an end. Every soldier, and the horse he rode in on, must override fear, horror, grief, and compassion to serve a staunch hierarchy of masters who may — or more likely may
not
— have everyone's best interests in mind.

And yet, after centuries of rampant destruction, profiteering, slavery, and genocide, here comes George Washington, a man who kept his sensitivity intact on the battlefield, tempering great passion, power, ambition, and fierceness with personal restraint, adaptability, equanimity, and empathy.
“Let your
heart
feel for the affliction
, and distresses of every one,” he advised.

That is
true
courage. That is
mature
leadership.

That is
evolution.

T
he human psyche is a dynamic ecosystem.
Without the right balance of day and night, sunshine and rain, predator and prey, culture and nature, a landscape originally designed to support life turns into a desert, a dust bowl, an apocalyptic, postnuclear nightmare of desolation and alienation. In symbolic terms, daylight represents conscious awareness: what we can see and name, predict and command. Much of that “other 90 percent” operates subconsciously or unconsciously, moving stealthily through the night, resisting full explanation and domestication. Yet people don't just shy away from darkness in favor of the light. Some odd quirk of human behavior forces each generation to relive the fall of Adam and Eve in all kinds of crafty, covert ways.

Scientists and atheists are not immune. Practical modern minds tend to glorify what is “light” — that which is logical, socially acceptable, profitable, and/or controllable. Anything outside each person's current worldview is shrouded in darkness — not just unknown, not just suspect, but damned. This includes forms of perception. If you're fanatically religious, you're likely to revere faith and submission to established theological doctrine while distrusting reason, intuition, and feeling. If you're a genetic researcher, on the other hand, you're much more apt to promote reason and established scientific doctrine while discounting faith, feeling, and intuition. Either way, significant forms of nonverbal awareness are outlawed, remaining grossly underdeveloped. Families, tribes, and religious and political organizations accentuate this self-limiting tendency, socializing members to accept a particular set of static judgments,
inspiring people to smugly dismiss, actively ostracize, threaten, or even kill those who operate from a different perspective.

No wonder so many of us reach middle age thirsting for something indescribable while feeling frightened or guilty about it. We've been reared by a culture of desert dwellers: obsessive, rain-phobic sun worshippers who shine massive spotlights at the stars to chase away the night. The mysterious, nourishing waters of emotion, empathy, instinct, artistic and mythic insight, gut feelings, and intersubjective awareness have all but dried up in many schools and professions. And it promises to get worse in the information age. After all, how do you quantify love or tweet your deepest, most elusive dreams?

To people who aren't particularly religious, the fall of Adam and Eve may seem like a quaint little folktale, but it's actually a brilliant teaching story, a perceptive, richly nuanced assessment of the flaw behind all human flaws: the
premature acquisition
of the knowledge of good and evil. The first man and woman, as you may recall, ate the forbidden fruit and were promptly expelled from paradise. But debates about why a benevolent God would put that disturbing tree in the garden usually ignore the possibility that it was planted for some future use: that the fruit would swell to ripeness as humanity itself matured.

Newly created and innocent to the core, Adam and Eve simply couldn't fathom the master plan of a fluid, multifaceted intelligence. From their pristine, undeveloped consciousness, parental cautions to stay away from that one compelling tree sounded stern and arbitrary. And so, like a couple of curious five-year-olds with no impulse control, they tasted the bitter knowledge of good and evil, resulting in the uniquely human compulsion to judge everything as either innately right or wrong, useful or useless, blessed or sinful.

Then, of course, they looked for someone else to blame. Adam complained that the woman tempted him to disobey God. And Eve became the first human to claim that “the devil made me do it.” Waves of fear and shame followed these stunned, overstimulated little creatures out of Eden, leaving their descendants to manage the divine gift of judgment from a confused, hopelessly dualistic, dangerously limited point of view.

Historically and across all cultures,
groups
of people mutually reinforce the tendency to deny wholeness in favor of the light, forgetting that God is not the sun but the one who invented day and night, sound and silence, form and formlessness, freedom and restraint, male and female, heaven and earth, and a host of other opposites as tools of the creator's trade. Adventurous souls sometimes plunge into darkness, engaging in obsessively hedonistic, risky, or outright criminal behavior as a form of rebellion, but here again they fail to achieve balance — and usually look for a scapegoat (society, parents, divorce, drugs, or
alcohol) to blame for their destructive, shortsighted ways. Only by exploring and integrating light and dark, spirit and matter, verbal and nonverbal awareness, predatory and nonpredatory power can we ever hope to reach our true potential.

I'm not saying anything new here. Thousands of books on psychology, mythology, art, religion, and symbolism explore ways to access parts of the mind that elude logic and language yet still prove essential to mental and emotional health. What I'm excavating in this brief history of power involves a lesser-known aspect of the optimally functioning psyche, one that has been repeatedly, sometimes dramatically, brought to our attention — then promptly ignored — for at least the past twenty-five hundred years. I'm talking about the inner, redemptive relationship between predator and prey, and, more specifically, the cultivation of nonpredatory wisdom as a key to, perhaps even a mandate of, human evolution.

I don't think I would have grasped the importance of the predator/prey dynamic had I not been investigating horse-training techniques in the early 1990s. Around that time, a small group of Western cowboys were actively bucking the system, promoting empathy and respect for the horse's perspective over traditional rough-riding, bronc-breaking practices. Through their increasingly popular books, videos, and public exhibitions, innovators like Bill and Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, Pat Parelli, and Monty Roberts came to be known as founders of the “natural horsemanship” movement, influencing a new generation of trainers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Regardless of the individual methods these men created, a core principle they all share involves the notion that humans are predators and horses are prey animals. Difficulties arise when people unconsciously act predatory with animals designed to flee large cats and packs of wolves. The intensity of our gaze alone can be unnerving. Horses have eyes on the sides of their heads, emphasizing peripheral vision, while humans, like lions, look directly ahead, reinforcing a goal-oriented perspective originally designed for stalking. Some trainers also insist that, to horses, we move around in a perpetual rearing position, poised for attack with our grasping, clawlike hands. And we smell like what we eat: meat.

In the 1970s, when I was investigating vegetarianism, I read a number of books making the opposite case. Human physiology, they said, proved that meat eating was unnatural for us. After all, we have no fangs, and our nails
can't rip through paper, let alone flesh. With the teeth and digestive system of an herbivore, we have to cook our steaks and cut them into bite-size portions. Some of us suffer colon cancer for our carnivorous sins.

The simple truth of the matter is that we are
omnivores,
with characteristics of both predator and prey. As a result, we all have Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde moments as we struggle to bring these opposites into balance. The problem is that we've grown up in a culture of conquerors, where predatory behavior is reinforced in school and rewarded in business. Those who refuse to claw their way to the top often have trouble imagining an alternative, because the “wisdom of the prey” has been educated right out of them. Some accept the role of victim simply because they can't stomach becoming a tyrant.

Horses have much to teach us about the middle ground between submission and aggression. They're not cowardly weaklings designed merely to panic and run. Mature horses can seriously maim or even kill a mountain lion. They've served in countless bloody battles; some have been rewarded for unusual bravery. Psychologically, however, horses are designed to outsense, outguess, and outwit predators. Many behaviors people misinterpret as equine stupidity are in fact intelligent, highly successful evasion tactics.

In working with these animals, people find that predatory aggression is a colossal waste of energy, because a horse isn't giving full attention to a lesson when he's feeling threatened; he's figuring out how to escape. Anyone who relies on fear and intimidation will spend a great deal of time blocking the increasingly inventive evasion techniques their horses will devise. This dynamic creates the adversarial relationships many riders consider normal.

In
Almost a Whisper,
Oklahoma-born trainer Sam Powell summed up his own awakening to the limitations of master-slave, “power-over” paradigms, mirroring the journey that most of his colleagues took in achieving breakthroughs characteristic of natural horsemanship:

I was a terrible kid,
always into something. I was hot-headed and would fight at the drop of a hat. I'd fight a buzz saw if one challenged me. I had no interest in school or anything else; I just wanted to be a cowboy. By the time I was twenty years old, I was a full-time cowboy and all that entailed, including a catalog of broken bones that grew larger year after year.

By my early forties, I had worked my way up to assistant manager of the horse division of a 128,000-acre ranch not far from Bartletsville, where I lost my passion for the cowboy ways, but fortysomething is a time when men take stock of their lives, weigh their successes and failures, confront their own limitations, sense their own mortality, and adjust their attitudes.