I have a stupid question to ask. Why do horses become fearful? What are they fearful of happening when something scares them? For example, when a horse spooks at a kangaroo, what does it think the kangaroo is going to do to it to justify a fear response?
Horse trainers know not to provoke the survival instinct in a horse because when that happens, the horse stops thinking through problems. But to assume a horse has a survival instinct also assumes that a horse has an understanding of death. Do horses really grasp the concept of life and death, existence or non-existence? I doubt this very much, but I could be wrong.
So what are horses afraid of? Is it pain and suffering?
But if it were pain and suffering, I suspect a horse would need to have experienced pain and suffering to know these are not good options, and it should be afraid of them. Yet many newborn foals, with no experience of pain and suffering, will show fear of other horses, dogs, people, and objects from the moment it is on their feet and running.
Charles Darwin had a theory on the subject. I suspect horses mostly don’t know why they are afraid of something. They just are. And the reason they are afraid without knowing why is that the horses that weren’t afraid got themselves killed before they could pass on their “fearless” genes to subsequent generations. Being afraid for irrational or rational reasons created behaviours that allowed horses to live long enough to pass along their genes to the generations that followed. So, we inherited a species of equid whose world is filled with irrational fears. It’s called evolution and natural selection.
If this is truly how horses developed their encyclopedia of fears, then it brings up the point that fear of things does not have to be rational to a horse. It does not necessarily know why it is afraid in order to be afraid.
Let’s put a human in the picture and a horse that imagines danger all around it. Let’s make the human a horseman who knows how to make a horse show respect and won’t tolerate insubordination or disobedience from a quadruped. Or maybe we’ll make the human somebody who is afraid of his or her horse being afraid and tries to quickly squash any demonstration of fear. The type of mindset that thinks of horse behaviour in terms of respect and disrespect or in terms of obedience and disobedience has no place in the horse world. It is an anathema to getting along with horses.
The problem stems from viewing a horse’s response as being all about us. If a horse jumps sideways at a puddle, our blood pressure is elevated because we could have fallen off. Bad horse. We reef the horse’s head to face the puddle again and kick him in the guts to show him that we won’t be intimidated and we won’t be disrespected. We know he is doing it to us because yesterday he walked quietly through the exact same puddle. In our mind, it is totally irrational that he jumped sideways today, but not yesterday. Therefore, there must be something wrong with his attitude towards us today. We don’t consider that his fear of the puddle does not have to be rational.
I know a person with a long history of this problem. Yet, the same person would never go to the cinema to watch a scary movie because it evoked a fear response in her, and she’d have to view most of the movie cowering in her seat with her eyes covered. She never accepted the parallel between her irrational fears of a movie and her horse’s irrational fear of a puddle. It was okay for her to be afraid of the irrational, but not her horse.
I do have a little empathy with the owner because I believe some of the intolerance of her horse’s fear is because when the horse became afraid, it made her afraid. So she made the worry inside her horse more about herself, rather than thinking about it from her horse’s viewpoint. She chose to see her horse’s fear and subsequent response as if it were being deliberately done to her, which made her afraid and angry. But when we know we are making the horse’s actions about us, we have the knowledge to stop doing it. Instead of seeing the horse’s actions as disrespectful or disobedient, we should see it more as a horse in need of help.
I feel lots of people know this, but I also believe not enough people know this. Sadly, I have had a very recent reminder of this, which is the reason for this essay. I want to keep campaigning against the idea that a horse’s reaction is sometimes deliberately targeted to be against us in a crusade of disrespect or disobedience – even if their behaviour appears to be irrational. I hope you will all join me.
