What If the Horse Came to See You?

What If the Horse Came to See You?

Morning usually starts before we have much to do with it.

The horses are already awake. Some are eating. Some are standing around doing very little. Two may be close together, one scratching the other’s neck with her teeth while the other shifts slightly to offer a better spot.

Then, after a while, they swap.

There is nothing unusual about it. Horses groom one another.

Still, I like watching it.

Nobody has arranged the meeting. Neither horse has been brought over to the other. There is no reason for it to last five minutes rather than twenty, and when one of them has had enough, she simply walks away.

No offence seems to be taken.

Their morning continues.

A little later, a human appears with a brush.

This is familiar too.

The person walks towards a horse, reaches her, and begins grooming. Maybe the horse enjoys it. Often she does. The human may be gentle, careful and someone the horse has known for years.

There is nothing wrong with this picture.

But there is one small difference that I did not think much about in the past.

The human decided that the interaction was going to happen.

We do this with horses constantly, and usually without noticing it.

We go to them.

We call them.

We walk across the field to find them.

We put on a halter, groom them, lead them somewhere, ask them to stand with us, or simply decide that now is the time we are going to spend together.

Even when what we are offering is pleasant, we are usually the ones who start it.

Once I began noticing that, I started wondering about the other direction.

What if the horse came to see us?

Not because she had been taught to come when called.

Not because we had found a cleverer way to get her attention.

Just because, at that moment, she chose to come over.

That sounds almost too simple to be worth writing about.

For me, it isn’t.

We live with nine Icelandic horses in the Netherlands. They are together as a herd and spend their lives outdoors throughout the year.

Because they live where we live, being with them is not always an activity we have to begin.

Sometimes I go outside because I need to do something that has absolutely nothing to do with horses. A horse notices me from somewhere in the field and comes over.

On another day, the same horse looks at me and carries on eating.

Another may walk beside me for a while and then decide that something else is more interesting.

I have become less interested in making those moments go a particular way.

If she comes, she comes.

If she leaves, she leaves.

This is not indifference. Quite the opposite. Once I stopped feeling that an interaction had to continue, I found myself paying more attention to how it began in the first place.

Was I the one who went looking for her?

Did I call?

Was I carrying something?

Had she already been heading in my direction?

Did she come directly to me, or was I simply standing next to a patch of grass she wanted?

Living with the same horses for a long time makes you a little suspicious of your own interpretations.

That has been useful.

It is very easy to see a horse walking towards a person and say, “She trusts me.”

Perhaps she does.

It is also possible that the person is standing beside the gate.

Or has food.

Or happens to be in the place the horse wanted to go anyway.

The longer I watch horses, the less interested I am in turning every small action into proof of a relationship.

The relationship becomes more interesting when it does not need constant proof.

There is another reason this matters to me.

A great deal of horse-human interaction, including very gentle forms of it, still begins with the human knowing what should happen next.

We may want the horse to approach.

To follow.

To stay.

To move away.

To return her attention.

The method can be soft. There may be no force involved. There may not even be a rope.

But the answer has often been chosen before the horse gives it.

That is different from a horse simply deciding to become involved.

I am not saying one should never ask anything of a horse. That would make ordinary horse care almost impossible.

Our horses need us to make decisions sometimes. We manage their land. We care for them. There are practical situations in which human intention is unavoidable.

What interests me is not the elimination of all influence.

It is the possibility that the relationship itself does not always have to begin with an instruction.

That is a surprisingly difficult idea to leave alone.

Because once we decide that we want a horse to “choose us,” we can immediately start trying to produce that choice.

We can learn a method for making the horse want to stay.

We can reward her for coming.

We can create pressure when she is elsewhere and remove it when she approaches.

We can become extremely sophisticated about getting a voluntary-looking result.

And then, without really noticing, we are back where we started.

The human has decided what the answer should be.

So perhaps the question is not:

How do I get my horse to come to me?

Maybe it is:

What happens if she really doesn’t have to?

I think this is where living with horses is different from having scheduled time with horses.

When you share the same place day after day, there is enough ordinary time for very little to happen.

That may not sound exciting, but it changes things.

The horses have hours in which we are irrelevant to them.

They have friends, disagreements, habits and preferences that have nothing to do with us.

They stand together.

They separate.

They move somewhere else.

They groom one another.

They sleep.

They notice something in the distance and all look in the same direction while the humans nearby have no idea what they are looking at.

Their life is already full.

Human interaction enters that life. It does not create it.

I think this may be one of the more useful things a herd can teach us.

We often talk about bringing the horse into our world.

Perhaps sometimes it is worth asking whether we have learned how to stand quietly enough in theirs.

And then there is the part that is much less serious.

It is simply nice when a horse comes to see you.

You open a door, walk outside, and there she is.

Or she isn’t there at first, but she notices you and starts walking across the field.

You were not on your way to collect her.

There is no lesson.

You have no brush in your hand.

There is nothing for her to get right.

She arrives, and now the two of you are standing there.

Perhaps you scratch her.

Perhaps she stays for ten minutes.

Perhaps thirty seconds later she leaves again.

For me, the interesting part is no longer whether I can keep her there.

It is that I did not bring her there in the first place.

Most of us are very familiar with going to see our horses.

I wonder what might change if, every now and then, we left enough room for the opposite to happen.

What if you did not always go to meet the horse?

What if sometimes the horse came to meet you?

There may be more in that small reversal than it first appears.