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.
I had broken just about every bone in my body, some more than once. I had seen a lot of cowboys and horses injured or permanently crippled by the methods we were using and I knew I was getting too old for that. Out of curiosity and physical necessity, I began to wonder if there might be a better way.
Powell and other natural-horsemanship proponents began saying some radical things, in public. They talked about treating the horse as a being rather than an object, of communicating with his mind rather than controlling his body. They recommended learning about prey-animal psychology and equine culture, which many of these men were uniquely qualified to document for one simple reason: they were living out on vast tracts of land with horses who had reclaimed an autonomous herd-based lifestyle. There, among the wolves and mountain lions, the storms and droughts, the hot summers and cold winters, horses exhibited surprisingly agile forms of intelligence, collaboration, and leadership that their stall-bound counterparts, and the overcivilized people who rode them, had long forgotten.
As these cowboys learned to harmonize with their herds, some men hinted at profoundly transformational experiences, not because they were trying to hide the details, but because they couldn’t translate their life-changing insights into words. Investigating equine culture meant traveling ever farther away from conventional human thought and behavior patterns, ever deeper into those mysterious realms of the “other 90 percent.” Brave and dedicated students of the horse came back, however, with a shine in their eyes, a confidence in their gait, and a calm yet powerful presence, insisting that horses had more to teach humans than the other way around.
Keep in mind the courage involved in sharing this information with others: when the term natural horsemanship was coined around 1985, the movement’s most basic principles were practically sacrilegious to fundamentalists who saw animals as soulless, God-given objects for human use, and to mainstream, twentieth-century scientists who treated animals as purely instinctual, emotionless machines. But the proof was in the pudding. Large numbers of professional and amateur riders began listening to these mavericks. At increasingly popular clinics and larger stadium exhibitions, people saw, unequivocally, that training techniques working with natural horse behavior were safer, more efficient, and much more enjoyable than fear and intimidation, dominance-submission practices.
And no matter how successful and charismatic these horse whisperers were, the very best of them were clear about one thing: the horses themselves had converted the original innovators, professional cowboys who came back from the open range with marked appreciation for the wisdom of the prey. As these men subsequently discovered, respectfully collaborating with a nonpredatory species had expanded their minds and their hearts, giving them a leg up on human relationships as well. But the original motivation was purely practical, a better way to get the job done. As one Arizona-based cowboy told me, “I had a reason to change, and it was called pain.”
The Yin Factor
We often think of the relationship between predator and prey as synonymous with that of perpetrator and victim. Horses, however, embody a different approach to power, modeling the strengths of nonpredatory behavior: relationship over territory, process over goal, responsiveness over strategy, cooperation over competition, emotion and intuition over reason. And yet, they can be focused and assertive when the situation calls for it. They quite literally follow the ancient Taoist recommendation to “know the yang, but keep to the yin,” which often appears in translation as “know the masculine, but keep to the feminine.” The Chinese sage Lao-tzu made this recommendation in the Tao Te Ching more than twenty-five hundred years ago; conquest-oriented civilizations emphasized the opposite. When a culture, like ours, keeps to the yang, discounting and degrading the yin, our ability to harmonize with other people, let alone nature, is seriously compromised.
At the same time, horses have little tolerance for timid, retiring, passive-aggressive people. If you sweetly ask for respect, without the conviction to hold your ground, they’ll herd you around for sport and become increasingly dominant, even dangerous, over time. Horses demand a balance of strength and sensitivity. If you have too much predator in you, they’ll become evasive. If you don’t engage enough assertiveness, they’ll treat you like a plaything. As nineteenth-century trainer Dennis Magner observed, working with horses requires “the delicacy of touch and feeling of a woman, the eye of an eagle, the courage of a lion, and the hang-on pluck of a bull-dog.”
The dynamic interplay between a more considerate, empathetic form of masculine power and a rise in feminine power was crucial to the rapid success of natural horsemanship in the 1990s. “For the first time in human history, women dominated the horse industry,” notes Robert Miller and Rick Lamb in The Revolution in Horsemanship and What It Means to Mankind. “The clinicians who pioneered this movement will tell you that without the prevalence of women in their audiences, they probably could not have stayed in business.” According to the authors, it took “the emancipation of women in the twentieth century combined with an elevated standard of living” to create the now-common phenomenon of the female pleasure rider.
If this has been fortuitous for the equine industry — those who sell tack and riding habit, horses, horseshoes, and horse products — it has been a blessing to the horse. Why? Because most women are nurturing by nature and try to avoid conflict. They are less aggressive than most men, less intimidating in their stance, speech, or movements, and less inhibited about crooning to or petting animals. These are exactly the qualities to which horses are most responsive.
Yet, these qualities, which are less intimidating to the horse and less likely to precipitate the desire for flight, can also cause the horse to be less respectful and to feel dominant to the woman.
The authors conclude that “both masculine and feminine traits are needed for effective communication,” that the “ideal” trainer “is a man who is in touch with his feminine side or a woman who is in touch with her masculine side.”
Natural-horsemanship philosophy, however, went beyond reuniting yin and yang. It brought to light a long-neglected pair of opposites essential to an advanced understanding of power. Thanks to the outback revelations of a few open-minded cowboys, the practical, lifesaving, and life-enhancing advantages of prey-animal wisdom echoed the biblical prediction that the lion shall lie down beside the lamb in paradise.
Built on the spoils of conquest, our civilization gave rise to a situation in which the lion became a ruthless, unstoppable killing machine. These days, it’s common for the predatory side of an individual’s personality to devour the prey aspect early in life. People