1
WATCHING WILD HORSES
There is no doubt that horses will exist as long as the human race, and that is well, for we still have so much to learn about them.
—C. WILLIAM BEEBE, naturalist
Sometime around thirty-five thousand years ago, when much of Europe was locked up in sheets of ice that pulsated sluggishly over the land like frozen heartbeats, an unknown artist acquired a bit of mammoth ivory. Perhaps he found the ivory lying on the ground. Or maybe a group of hunters brought it to him as an offering.
This mysterious craftsman possessed phenomenal skill. Wielding with great precision a set of exquisitely honed stone tools, he began carving a masterpiece. A magnificently arched stallion’s neck appeared, breathtaking in its extraordinary combination of muscular potency and simple natural grace.
The earliest example of an archetype that has since then appeared in art worldwide, this horse embodies the essence of majesty. He is the supreme example of Platonic form, “an abstraction of the graceful essence of the horse,” in the words of the anthropologist Ian Tattersall, or, more simply, the rasa of horse, to use a Sanskrit term. The curvaceous line of his head and neck flows smoothly into his withers and backline, creating an elegant S curve that finishes just below the hindquarters. The head, slightly cocked, gives the animal an air of fortitude and deep contemplation.
When we see him, we love him. And we recognize him: This sculpture could have been carved only yesterday. Across thirty-five millennia, you can almost hear him snort and see him toss his head, warning encroaching stallions to take care. Called “esthetically perfect” by his current curator, Harald Floss of Germany’s University of Tübingen, this two-inch-long marvel, standing only about an inch high, is known as the Vogelherd horse, in honor of the cave in southern Germany in which it was discovered.
The carving provides evidence that the emotional bond between horses and humans began long, long ago—tens of thousands of years before human civilization began, well before horses became domesticated, well before we kept horses in our barns and in our fields to be used as tools. We have no idea who created this tour de force, but we do know one thing: this ivory carver spent a lot of time watching wild horses, studying their social interactions and learning their body language. He carved his subject confidently, with a sure hand.
We also know that the artist was a member of the first group of thoroughly modern humans to create a substantial presence in Europe. These people, Aurignacians, revered not just horses but many animals. Their art is exquisite—but it’s so much more than that. It’s a scientifically valuable body of evidence that provides us with precious data, including a record of the wildlife with which early humans shared Ice Age Europe’s river valleys, marshlands, and open plains. This record consists of an endless array of painted caves, countless bas-relief sculptures, sketches and etchings, and many, many more carvings—all of which depict, sometimes in great detail, the strange animals like woolly rhinoceroses living in Pleistocene Europe.
Some of these creations are of impressively high quality—and yet, the art is far from rare. In fact, it’s curiously omnipresent. Archaeological sites containing art from this time have been found in western Spain, in Italy, and in France, and all the way east into Russia. A modern admirer could easily set aside a whole summer to study them and still have seen only a small portion. Nevertheless, common as this art is, its mere existence is almost miraculous: Aurignacian art appears in the European archaeological record seemingly quite suddenly, as though a genie waved a hand and humans became creative. There are no obvious precursors, no clear antecedents that show any kind of learning curve. Of course, archaeologists say, this could not be literally true. There must have been some learning period, complete with an upward-moving arc of acquired skills, but, as of now, almost no evidence of this arc has been discovered.
The phenomenon is so remarkable that some researchers once suggested that the Homo sapiens brain, already around for well over a hundred thousand years, may have undergone a sudden neurological advance—some shift in the human psyche that brought about the creative impulse. That theory is no longer in vogue, but it is clear that something monumental had occurred. Otherwise, scientists are at a loss to explain the ivory carver’s tiny talisman.
The Vogelherd horse, caught in the act of behaving with such supreme hauteur, is so much more than a simple symbol—he’s a living animal, frozen in a specific instant in time. He is about to strike out with a forefoot, or perhaps about to sidle up to a mare. He is the modern Friesian stallion pacing anxiously in our pastures, just about to shake his head, or the American mustang* running free on the open plains, about to pose against some red-rock cliffs, or the accomplished dressage horse about to execute a perfect piaffe, that beloved classical movement that shows off a horse’s contained energy and flowing grace.
All of this begs the question: Why? Why did the artist care so much about a horse? Was this a religious icon? Was it tradable currency? Did it confer a stallion’s energy on its human possessor? Or was it perhaps not important at all, but just a toy made one winter afternoon to entertain the kids?
Whatever its purpose, this stallion was not put on a pedestal and simply admired. He was handled. A lot. The artist carved tiny lines into the horse’s back, and the lines are now well-worn by having been touched many times by human hands.
The answers to our questions may be forever elusive, but we do know one thing. We share with the ancient artist a powerful emotional response: we today are just as mesmerized by horses as were people thirty-five thousand years ago. Even today, separated as we are from the natural world, we yearn for contact with horses. Just ask any mounted policeman.
Although the ancient carving is shrouded in mystery, he had plenty of company. For the next twenty thousand years, until the ice finally melted and Europe entered our present warm period, artists created horses in whatever medium they favored—ivory, antler, wood, stone, paint.
Horses are the stars of Ice Age art. Indeed, horses are the most frequently represented animal in the twenty-thousand-year period that preceded the advent of farming and what we call civilization. At Abri de Cap Blanc in France, a fifteen-thousand-year-old rock overhang under which people lived, a nearly life-size bas-relief of horses was carved into the rock wall that served as a backdrop for day-to-day family life. When I visited this site, the stone carving reminded me of kitchen art—something to ponder while you stir the soup—yet the Cap Blanc horses are as vivid as any created by Leonardo da Vinci. They seem to come alive and jump out of the rock when light flickers over them.
Hundreds of miles west of Cap Blanc, in the caves of the Spanish north coast, sensitively drawn ponies frolic on the walls with joy and abandon. Thousands of miles east, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, horses sketched in red ocher grace the walls of Kapova Cave. On the walls of Chauvet Cave in southern France, painted horses stand in small groups, watching the wildlife around them, including lions prowling nearby. Some Chauvet horses graze while others keep watch. Elsewhere in the cave, a timid horse peeks out from behind a rock. What is he afraid of? The hunting lions? A powerful stallion?
Ice Age artists seemed to know everything about horses. Until Leonardo came along and actually studied the horse’s anatomy, no other artists equaled these Pleistocene virtuosos in their portrayal of what it was like to be a horse. To me, these first-known, highly accomplished artists are also the world’s first animal behaviorists. They must have spent hours and days and months and years just watching. They understood horses’ facial expressions, how their nostrils flared when they were frightened, how their ears betrayed their inner emotions, how they sometimes stood together in small bands, and how, sometimes, they would wander alone and seem rather forlorn. From this art, we know that long before horses became our tools, long before the bit and the bridle were invented, we Homo sapiens adored watching wild horses.
Sadly, though, in the modern world, this has become something of a lost art. While we enjoy seeing free-roaming horses, few of us sit quietly and study them in depth. Consequently, we suffer from lack of context. We see what the horse is doing, but we don’t always know why he’s doing it. We know little about how horsesreally behave when they’re out of our sight. We see horses standing in our barns and pastures and mistakenly assume that what we see is the essence of “horse.” I’ve always thought this rather strange.
On the other hand, ethologists study the behavior of lions in the wild, of birds, of monkeys, of whales, and of elephants. Their research has enriched our view of what it means to be part of the living universe, so that we now understand that we all fit into a finely woven web, and that this web, in a reasonably healthy state, is central to our own well-being. We may be top dog when it comes to creating an electronic society, but other animals have talents in other areas that far exceed ours.
This revolution in our understanding of the natural behavior of animals was brought into the public spotlight in the 1960s by authors such as the Nobel Prize–winner Konrad Lorenz, whose bestselling books included King Solomon’s Ring and On Aggression. Lorenz was particularly well-known for establishing scientifically the importance of attachment in the lives of animals. He emphasized that studies of animals in laboratory settings did not reveal the true nature of various species. To understand that, he wrote, animals must be observed in the context in which they naturally live.
His books caused a worldwide transformation in our thinking about wildlife. Young scientists from many different nations set up research sites in remote parts of the world and methodically recorded the behavior of the animals they watched. For example, for more than forty years, Jane Goodall and her team have studied chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. When Goodall began her work, she shocked—“shocked” is not too strong a word—the world by reporting that primates commonly fashioned and used tools. So much for the formerly unshakable status of humans as the only toolmakers on Planet Earth. At about the same time, in the 1960s, Roger Payne and Scott McVay studied the behavior of humpback whales and found that they communicate with each other by singing what Payne called “rivers” of sound. So much for the status of humans as the only beings with sophisticated communication systems. Crows are adept at creative problem solving. Octopuses use their arms to open jars, to build complicated rock shelters, even to carry seashells in case they need emergency housing. Elephants use teamwork to protect family members. Bats echolocate. Bees have swarm intelligence.
But what about horses? What are their special powers? How much has modern ethology learned about the natural behavior of horses? Not much, it turns out. Why? If our fascination with the details of horse behavior stretches back at least thirty-five thousand years, as the evidence shows us, why have horses been left out of this scientific reformation? Equine scientists have studied the best way to train show horses, the best way to feed racehorses, the best way to heal the delicate bones in a lame horse’s feet. But the natural behavior of horses was rarely considered to be of scientific interest. Only a handful of ethologists had watched wild horses in a methodical manner. And of the studies that were done, very few were long-term projects akin to those of Jane Goodall.
That’s beginning to change.
* * *
Jason Ransom and I were talking about this one July evening in Cody, Wyoming, a gateway town near Yellowstone National Park, founded by Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West showmen more than a century ago. Ransom, an equine ethologist, and I had met a year earlier at an international conference held in Vienna that was attended by scientists who study free-roaming equids—horses, zebras, onagers, wild asses, and donkeys—at sites located around the world. Ransom invited me to come and meet some of his study subjects—several populations of wild horses who roam regions of Wyoming and Montana. He had followed their behavior over a period of five years and discovered some behaviors that upended many long-held myths about how horses bond with and interact with each other.
Meeting up in Wyoming, we spent several days watching Ransom’s study subjects and watching the people who came from around the world just to watch the horses. Like our Ice Age ancestors, these people sat for hours, enjoying the scene. Small groups talked among themselves, discussing the horses and interpreting their actions. Some people even camped out, so they could observe the horses for a complete twenty-four-hour period. It made for an entertaining time, and I could easily imagine a similar scene tens of thousands of years earlier: people relaxing in the summer sunshine and discussing what the horses were up to.
That particular July evening, after a great day of wild horse watching, Ransom and I were leafing through one of several books of Ice Age art that I had brought. As we looked at the reproductions of Ice Age prancing ponies painted on the walls of many different caves in France and Spain, we talked about how many of the complex behaviors shown on those prehistoric cave walls were behaviors we had seen in real life just hours earlier.
We discussed the power of horses over the ancient human mind and compared it to the power of horses over themodern human mind. Horses and humans, we realized, have so much in common: we are both the result of tens of millions of years of planetary upheavals, of the ebb and flow of plant life, of rising mountains and shifting ocean currents. Because of this common evolutionary heritage, we are drawn to horses in a way that’s rudimentary, elemental, even atavistic. Consider the tantalizing story of Nadia, an autistic savant who, at the age of three, broke out of her shell by suddenly—spontaneously, without any training at all—drawing spectacular galloping horses, horses with flowing manes and tails, horses created from memory but perfectly, sublimely depicted in correct proportion. Nadia could have chosen to draw any number of animals, but what drew her attention was horses. Perhaps, Ransom and I thought, a fascination for horses is somehow encoded in our genes. When we see horses running on an open plain, we imagine ourselves doing the same thing. Even when people are separated from the natural world, even when they spend most of their lives in twenty-first-century cities, horses still speak to something essential in us, just as they spoke to something essential for the carver of the Vogelherd horse.
“Most people today are not at all familiar with what it is to be a horse,” Ransom said, “but they can still see a picture of a horse and love it. What is that? What is the factor that connects us?”
That our love affair with horses has been going on for tens of thousands of years, Ransom and I decided, speaks volumes. And yet, we modern people misunderstand horses in some important ways. Since the days when I looked after Whisper and Gray, I have had many horses and happily spent more than my fair share of time in the saddle. I thought I knew a lot about how they behaved. But under Ransom’s tutelage, I realized that I knew almost nothing about them, save for how they behave in a barn or paddock.
By watching wild horses*—horses born away from human contact, as opposed to domesticated horses, raised around humans—I learned that horses are exquisitely sophisticated animals, capable of all kinds of unexpected interactions. And I learned that the act of watching is so much more interesting if you know the backstories of the individual animals you’re looking at. You’ll learn that various horses often set their own agendas, and you’ll slowly come to understand those agendas. That’s when things get intriguing, because each horse has his or her own personality. As I learned with Whisper and Gray, one horse may take bold action to solve a problem while another may choose a more passive course. But that doesn’t mean that the passive course is any less goal-directed.
Horses are different from many of the other ungulates—hoofed mammals—who populate everything from savannas and grasslands to forests and rocky outcroppings around the world. Ungulates are common. Cows and goats and sheep, bison and deer and moose are all ungulates. However, unlike many ungulates, who seek safety in numbers and who roam the plains in large groups, horses form intimate social bonds, just as elephants do. With horses, though, those bonds, while strong, are also quite fluid. As with humans, friendships come and go, foals grow up and depart to live elsewhere, and male-female relationships sometimes work out and sometimes don’t.
These close bonds are essential to the horse’s psyche. Lacking the opportunity to form such attachments, the natural horse becomes a different animal. His social world is his raison d’être, the foundation of his existence and the reason why he does many of the things he does. After all, in the natural world in which horses evolved, solitary horses usually didn’t survive. Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, science has discovered that they are not “herd” animals. Instead of seeking safety in large numbers, horses live year-round in small groups called bands. Membership in these bands, which may consist of as few as three horses or as many as ten or so, is just as fluid as are the individual bonds, but there’s usually a central core of closely allied mares and their young offspring.
Like humans, horses in a band are notorious squabblers. Also like humans, band members fail to thrive without friends and family. These attachments are essential. Despite what you see in Hollywood movies, horses, unlike cattle or bison, rarely “stampede” en masse. If several bands of horses grazing in the same area are frightened by something, the bands are likely to head off in all different directions. Their various flight trajectories may look more like spokes in a wheel. This tendency to scatter, if given an opportunity, is one of their survival strategies.
Band members are not simply group animals with gang-like mentalities. As Ransom and other equine ethologists have found, individual bonds within bands may be more important than group identity, just as with us. These bonds are sometimes based on family ties, but often they are just based on individual preference.
When you watch wild horses and you know their life histories, it’s like following a soap opera. There’s a constant undercurrent of arguing, of jockeying for position and power, of battling over personal space, of loyalty and betrayal. The show never lets up. Alliances are made and broken. Underlings often defy power. Sometimes a horse’s great patience is rewarded and he gets what he wants. Sometimes it isn’t and he doesn’t.
The spectacle is positively Shakespearean. To understand the script fully, you have to pay close attention: like kings and princes, politicians and chimpanzees, some horses act one way in public and then behave quite differently when no one is looking, just as Whisper did.
Earlier that sweltering July day, Ransom and I had watched one of his favorite stallions, Tecumseh, a pinto who roamed a region known as McCulloch Peaks. Tecumseh had been presiding over a stallion squealing contest. As we watched, the bickering got out of hand. Arching his neck, poised for a fight, he looked for all the world like the modern avatar of the Vogelherd horse. Males of many different species like to show their stuff— think of the glory of the peacock’s spread tail feathers—but stallions are expert at the art of exuding masculine glamour. They are true drama queens.
As we watched, Tecumseh’s whole body wound itself into a warning: Get away from me or you’ll be sorry. It wasn’t hard to see what he was getting all huffy about. A gang of four pushy boys—too old to be allowed by the mares to hang around the foals and too young to attract mares themselves—had edged up on Tecumseh’s personal space. They reminded me of a group of awkward teenage boys sauntering down a city street.
This gang was getting too assertive with Tecumseh and failing to respect the keep-your-distance rule to which horses generally adhere. Even worse, the boys were also implying that they’d like to improve their acquaintance with the mares with whom Tecumseh was then keeping company.
Tecumseh was having none of that. He stared them down. He raised his head and coiled his hindquarters, as if preparing to chase them off. He lifted one foreleg straight up in front of him—then pounded the ground. After he’d shown just how powerful that foreleg was, he lifted and pounded with the other foreleg.
The four marauders, too young to challenge the old man, walked off to sniff a dung pile.
They had a lot to learn. When stallions fuss with each other the scene rarely heats up into an all-out battle, but you never quite know just how things will play out. In the Pryor Mountains, another region where horses roam freely, Ransom and I saw one stallion, for a reason that was not at all obvious, start to chase a second stallion who was standing quite a distance away. Other stallions were closer to this aggressive male, but he ignored them. Instead, he trotted over to this particular far-off stallion and, snorting and screaming, drove him into a small copse of trees at the far end of the meadow. We lost sight of them. Then they emerged from the trees and galloped across the meadow, creating a general uproar. One chasing the other, they ran to where several other bands were minding their own business. Stallion Number One stretched his head out toward his enemy. He looked like a snake. He bared his teeth. He meant business. Then the two stallions, one fleeing and one chasing, ran too close to a small ridge. This was a poor decision.
Beneath this ridge grazed a band of mares accompanied by yet a third stallion. Stallion Number Three, dubbed Duke by researchers, stormed straight up the ridge. Stallion Number One, the initial aggressor, had met his match. Duke, large and well muscled, was full of attitude. A great deal of head-tossing and snorting followed as the first stallion tried to hold his ground, but all you had to do was glance at the pair to see that he never had a chance. There was no question about who would back down first.
Duke was clearly Lord of All He Surveyed. Stallion Number One skulked away. Stallion Number Two, the one who had been chased all across the meadow, was nowhere to be seen. As the curtain fell on this act, Duke held center stage, displaying his royally arched neck for a few seconds before calmly returning to his grazing.
What had brought on this chaos? Ransom wasn’t sure. Adult horses rarely exert themselves in summertime heat unless they have to, but this time thundering hoofs had raged across the whole meadow. As we watched the horses, we noticed that the mares paid little overt attention to the male shenanigans. In fact, in my time watching wild horses, I have never seen mares react to the hostile antics of stallions—as long as the boys kept their problems to themselves.
“That’s usually the case,” Ransom said when I asked about this. There are some times, he said, when mares will add their opinions to a dispute between stallions, but those times are very, very rare.
In my childhood books I often read about mares huddling together and breathlessly waiting to see the outcome of the stallions’ battles, but this is not at all what happens. Mares usually ignore the males’ conflicts. This makes sense. After all, if mares stopped eating every time two stallions had a stare-down, the mares would starve to death.
* * *
For his doctoral dissertation, Ransom, with the help of several assistants, including the local horse expert Phyllis Preator, recorded the behavior of individual horses living in three different regions in Wyoming and Colorado. That research generated a lot of data that, together with work done earlier on the same horses by other scientists, has created a rich long-term record of the intimate social lives of individual wild horses, one of the few such records anywhere in the world. The data is so thorough that Ransom can sometimes find the birth dates of horses who were, by the time he began his work, already entering old age. He knew where some of these horses had spent most of their lives, knew when some had moved from one area to another, knew when they joined up with specific horses and how long they stayed with their companions before moving on.
Recent ethological research has finally begun to reveal the depth of horses’ emotions, but the idea, scientifically speaking, that horses have emotions is nothing new. Charles Darwin wrote about horses (and many other animals) in his 1872 masterwork The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which proposed that human emotional expressions are innate and universal, and are shared by a variety of animals. Considered a founding text for the science of ethology, Darwin’s book explained that certain basic emotions—anger and fear and disgust, for example—evolved as survival mechanisms early in the history of life. For example, in The Expression of the Emotions, Darwin compared his own startle response at the approach of a large snake to the startle response of a frightened horse. Shared emotions, Darwin declared, help us understand the emotions of other species. “Everyone recognizes the vicious appearance which the drawing back of the ears gives to a horse,” he wrote. That was certainly true in the Pryor Mountains that day, when Ransom and I watched the snaking stallion with his flattened ears. Neither of us was about to get in the marauder’s way.
For Darwin, basic emotions were a universal language, a kind of innate lingua franca common to “man and the lower animals,” as he put it. They are survival strategies that, Darwin believed, could be studied methodically across species. Darwin’s groundbreaking book set the study of animal behavior and emotions on a solid foundation. It said, scientifically: We are all in this together.
The Expression of the Emotions and Darwin’s subsequent writings spawned all sorts of scientific studies of animal behavior, but horses for the most part were left out of this paradigm shift, despite Darwin’s discussion of horse behavior in The Expression. Perhaps this was just a case of familiarity breeding contempt: we assumed we already knew all we needed to know about horses because domesticated horses were part of our everyday lives.
Now that ethological research principles have begun to be applied to the study of wild horses, we have learned how little we know. Thankfully, researchers are upending many deeply embedded myths. For example, a recent National Academy of Sciences report declared that “a harem, also known as a band, consists of a dominant stallion, subordinate adult males and females, and offspring.” Most of us have been taught this and at first glance, it would seem to be true. What we notice when watching wild horses is the uproar created by the stallions.
But research by Ransom and others has shown that this male-centric view is wrong. Far from subordinate, mares frequently initiate the band’s activities. The stallions are quite often little more than hangers-on. Ransom was once watching a band of mares who stopped grazing and began heading for water. The stallion didn’t notice. When he looked up and saw his female companions leaving, he panicked.
“He started running after them,” Ransom told me. “He was like a little boy calling out ‘Hey, where’s everybody going?’”
The mares ignored him. Whether the stallion caught up or not didn’t appear to concern them. Mares also sometimes have stallion preferences. They resist males they don’t like with surprising persistence, even when that male has established himself as the band’s stallion. The ecologist Joel Berger studied the behavior of two unrelated mares who had spent several years together. The pair joined a band which was then taken over by a new stallion, who tried to assert himself. The two mares refused to accept his attentions. For three days “during numerous forced copulation attempts toward both by this stallion, the females reciprocally aided each other (thirteen times and eighteen times respectively) by kicking and biting the stallion as he persistently and aggressively” tried to mate, Berger wrote in Wild Horses of the Great Basin. It’s long been known that female elephants cooperate, but before ethologists began systematically studying free-roaming horses, few people suspected that cooperating mares were capable not only of waging such a fight—but of winning it. Given the truth about mares, “harem” seems like such an old-fashioned word.
The biologist John Turner found much the same thing when he studied horses living in high chaparral country on the California-Nevada border. Turner’s ongoing research, which has lasted at this writing for almost thirty years, has revealed many occasions when mares were not subordinate to stallions, particularly when one band stallion was driven away by a new stallion. The behavior of these mares was often subtle and indirect, he told me, so that unless observers pay close attention over many years, they might miss the fact that the mares do often get their own way.
“Sometimes a mare resisting the change behaves in such a way that the new stallion just lets the old stallion come and take her away,” he told me. For the new stallion, coveting these resistant mares may just not be worth the trouble. “It’s easy to anthropomorphize some of this,” he said, “but sometimes, that’s the way it is. Horses do a lot of the same things that we do.”
* * *
At the conference in Vienna where I met Ransom I also met the Spanish equine ethologist Laura Lagos, who, with the wildlife biologist Felipe Bárcena, studies the behavior of an unusual type of free-roaming horse called a Garrano. Lagos invited me to come visit her study site in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. In this rugged region, shared by horses and wolves and humans for millennia, Lagos and Bárcena have notated the behavior of these free-roaming horses for years, just as Ransom and his team have done in Wyoming and Colorado. The scientists have come to admire the horses’ tough, stubborn natures.
Garranos, possibly descended from the horses painted by the Ice Age artists, live rough, tough lives. In the American West, free-roaming horses have few predators, but Garranos must defend themselves from relentless wolf packs. They must be able to thrive in a challenging North Atlantic climate and must live on a dreadful diet of gorse. Sometimes called the Plant from Hell, gorse has sharp thorns in lieu of leaves and can grow waist high. Walking through it without long pants is akin to medieval bloodletting, yet Garranos love this stuff. Many have thick handlebar mustaches that may have evolved to protect their sensitive lips from nasty gashes.
In the course of their study, Lagos and Bárcena cataloged the behavior of a pair of mares in one band who were strongly bonded with each other and who often stood just a bit apart from the rest of the band. At breeding time, the mares went together to visit the stallion of another band. Lagos watched one of the mares consort with this stallion rather than with the stallion from her own band. Then the mares returned to their original group. When the second mare was ready to breed, the duo again deserted their original band and its stallion to consort with the other stallion. Then, again, they returned to their original group. This was not an anomaly. She saw the same pair do the same thing the following year. “They prefer their own territory, but the stallion of the other band,” she told me.
The researchers Katherine Houpt and Ronald Keiper, who followed the behavior of several horse bands including the horses of the North American Atlantic coast’s Assateague Island, have also found that “the stallions were neither the dominant nor the most aggressive animals … and were subordinate to some mares.”
I suspect that the myth of stallion dominance has persisted for so long because stallion behavior makes for some pretty enthralling theater. The stallions puff themselves up and snort and squeal, and then, if the battle proceeds, rear up and clash in a frenzy of bellicosity. By contrast, mares going about their business of grazing and raising foals lack the pizzazz factor.
The prevalence of our belief that stallions dominate a band may be due to the hierarchical structure of our own culture, suggests the British researcher Deborah Goodwin. She believes that our own emphasis on dominance has caused us to view relationships among horses with blinders on.
The “blinder factor” may be why we often fail to grasp the flexibility of natural horse behavior. Traditionally, instead of thinking about the relationship between a horse and a human as a partnership, we have thought of it in anthropocentric terms: we dominate and horses submit, according to what we assume is the natural order of things. End of story. Since we don’t look closely enough, we misunderstand. We miss the fact that the social lives of mares may be rather complicated. One mare may dominate a second mare, and the second mare may dominate a third mare—but the third mare may dominate the first mare.
Moreover, it turns out that mares don’t need to have huge fights to get what they want. Instead, they use the technique of patience.
For example, Ransom believes that only about half the foals in the bands he studied are sired by the band’s closely associated stallion. This finding flies in the face of conventional thinking, which claims that stallions often kill foals who are not their own.*
I was surprised.
“What,” I asked him, “are the mares getting up to when no one is looking?”
He answered with the backstory of High Tail, a seemingly nondescript little mare, a plain Jane with sagging back and poor coat, a mare we were watching at the foot of the Pryors, on the Wyoming side of the mountains. She was dubbed High Tail because the dock of her tail sat a bit too high on her croup. An aging dun with a thick, solid black stripe running down her back, High Tail had zebra-like black bars on her withers and zebra-like striping on the backs of her lower forelegs. Apart from these distinctive markings, High Tail looked like any mare standing in a farm field. If you didn’t know her life story, you could easily mistake her for a child’s riding pony or a retired plow horse. With her glory days clearly over, you probably wouldn’t give her a second glance.
Yet Ransom’s data showed that this mare had had a rich and varied life that involved a number of long-term male associates. She had been deeply bonded to at least one of them, her youthful first attachment. High Tail was by no means as physically powerful as stallions like Duke or Tecumseh—but what she did have was an abundance of persistence. She called her own shots.
Free-roaming horses tend to have minds of their own. Says Phyllis Preator, “They think different. That’s all I can say. They just think different.” If mustangs in general “think different” from domesticated horses, then High Tail tended to “think different” even from other mustangs.
Many of the Pryor Mountain horses choose to spend their summers in the flower-filled lush meadows thousands of feet above where we stood watching High Tail. Those high summer meadows, filled with aromatic lupines and sweet buttercups and other delicious treats, are like the proverbial land of milk and honey for horses who must weather unpredictable and harsh Wyoming winters.
Nevertheless, High Tail never went up there. She was born in 1989 down in more desertlike regions and that’s where she chose to stay. That’s one of the major differences between horse bands and grazing herd animals. Horses prefer a familiar home territory. They circle around from spot to spot, enjoying windy ridgelines in the summer and protective valleys in the winter, but they rarely migrate long distances.
Ransom first caught up with High Tail in 2003. He found the mare passing her days in the company of Sam, a stallion born in 1991. They made up a pair who, Ransom thought, probably encountered each other during the wanderings of their youth. An old myth claims that a stallion acquires mares, but if you watch closely enough, you’ll see that mares sometimes work hard to get a stallion’s attention. They can be every bit as assertive as stallions.
However the alliance between High Tail and Sam began, it worked. They stayed together for years. Eventually, other mares joined them and Sam found himself attached to a small mare-and-offspring group. Research shows that roughly half the time mares and stallions bond in this peaceful fashion. There’s no need for a stallion to “conquer” the mare; she’s often a more-than-willing partner.
Shortly after Ransom began following High Tail and Sam’s band, he noticed a second, younger stallion hanging around a short distance away. Sam did not welcome this new stallion, dubbed Sitting Bull. The more Sitting Bull tried to become part of the group, the more Sam fought him off. Sam spent a good deal of energy trying to drive away the younger stallion, but to no avail.
Whenever Ransom saw High Tail’s band during this period, Sitting Bull was usually there, hanging around on the outskirts, stalking the mares and dogging Sam, waiting for his chance. A stallion like this, called a satellite stallion, adopts a mating strategy of patience. He’s always there, just on the outskirts, hoping to catch the eye of one of the mares: “To be a stalker pretty much sums up the idea,” Ransom said. There are stories in the scientific literature of satellite stallions learning how to cooperate with the lead stallion and thus gradually gaining the ability, on a limited basis, to mate with some mares, but this was not the case with Sam and Sitting Bull. The two fought continuously. Still, Sitting Bull stayed near, biding his time.
His chance came in 2004. Horses who live at the base of the Pryor Mountains constantly face the challenge of finding freshwater. High Tail’s band often descended the steep walls of the Big Horn Canyon Gorge, where they could drink their fill of river water. One day, they went down as a group. Records show that Sam did not allow Sitting Bull to come along. While the young stallion waited above, the rest of the horses stood on a small ledge and drank. Off in the distance heavy rains broke out. A flash flood inundated the gorge, cutting off the animals’ escape route. For about two weeks, High Tail and her band, along with Sam, remained trapped without food. Conditions were so stressful that one mare died giving birth.
Realizing that the situation was dire, people intervened and helped them escape. The severely emaciated animals managed to climb up out of the gorge. Sam in particular had lost his muscular sleekness. Almost dead from starvation, he was easy pickings for the satellite stallion, who had hung around above the gorge. When the horses came up, Sitting Bull “just swooped right in and drove Sam off,” Ransom said. Sam tried repeatedly to drive off his younger competitor, but he was no longer strong enough.
Most of the band accepted the young stallion. Not High Tail. The old dun mare chose Sam, the stallion with whom she had spent a good deal of her life. For High Tail, the bond with Sam was even stronger than the bond she had with the other mares in her group. At every opportunity she left her own band and headed off in search of her longtime mate. Each time she left, the young stallion chased her back, snaking his head and baring his teeth, threatening her with injury.
To avoid being bitten, she complied and returned to the band, but the next time Sitting Bull failed to pay attention, High Tail took off again. “We’d see her with Sitting Bull briefly,” Ransom explained, “and then we’d see her back with Sam.” This went on for many weeks until the younger stallion gave up chasing her. “From then on,” Ransom said, “it was just Sam and High Tail. They got their weight back and at first Sam tried to drive Sitting Bull off and get back with the other mares, but each time he tried, he failed.”
High Tail stayed with Sam until he died in 2010. (Because of the stress of constant fighting with other males, stallions often live much shorter lives than mares.) Following Sam’s death, researchers saw High Tail with a stallion they called Admiral. Eventually Admiral, too, fell from grace.
When we saw her that July afternoon, old High Tail was with only two other horses. One was a mare from her original band, an animal she’d known for years. The other was, ironically, that old usurper Sitting Bull. Rejected by High Tail in her younger years, he was now one of her boon companions. Primate field researchers long ago discovered the ebb and flow of alliances within primate troops, and finally we know that horses in the wild behave this way, too.
I asked Ransom if he thought there were any hard-and-fast rules about horse behavior in the wild.
“They rarely choose to be alone,” he said. “That’s one given.”
Other than that, he couldn’t think of much. Like humans, horses are blessed with an exceptional cognitive flexibility that allows them to adapt to a phenomenal variety of situations.
Traditionally, we’ve thought that horses only function via a kind of computerlike binary code of positive and negative reinforcement—the carrot or the stick. Now that science is showing us the subtleties of how horses naturally interact with each other, we can expand our own interactions with them, improve our ability to communicate with them, and enrich our partnership. This is exciting news, not just for horses, but for us, too. A relationship that has been traditionally seen as unidirectional—we command and they obey—can now become much more nuanced and sensitive.
I once acquired a dog who had been very finely trained. Whatever I asked that dog to do, he would do. This was fun at first, but ultimately, it was boring. There was nothing coming back from the dog, no emotional reward. After a year in my chaotic household, though, the dog had learned that our relationship was a two-way street. He was still obedient (to a degree), but he was much more of a developed individual. And he was a whole lot more fun to be with.
I suspect that I enjoyed Whisper for the same reason: He was, as I said, the most polite horse I ever had. But he was also very independent, very much his own man. He taught me more than I could ever have taught him. Whisper’s course in why it’s useful to think about the minds of animals has stayed with me for a lifetime and, quite probably, kept me alive in some pretty dicey situations when I found myself on the back of a horse in a place where I definitely should not have been.
But I never expected to get another life lesson from a horse out in the mountains of Wyoming. And yet, there was that old dun mare, High Tail, sending the message that a life well lived may have nothing to do with glamour, power, and drama, and everything to do with just being quietly persistent. Fate had not favored her. Nevertheless, she had lived long and prospered, had several long-term relationships and a number of offspring. Perhaps evolution sometimes favors the nondescript.
* * *
As Ransom and I talked, in the distance we could see the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains, mountains which, ever since they began regrowing 66 million years ago, have dominated the story of horse evolution. As we watched the old mare, the sky darkened over the peaks of those mountains.
For about the umpteenth day in a row, temperatures had stretched up toward 100 degrees, and over in Cody, the sun was relentlessly baking any living thing that dared emerge from under a rock or a roof or a leaf. Walking through the sagebrush from Ransom’s truck to find the horses, we’d worn nothing but light T-shirts, and even those felt too heavy beneath the blazing sun and deep blue sky.
But now, over those ancient mountain peaks, midnight-black clouds rushed in. Up on the nine-thousand-foot-high pinnacles where other bands of horses were munching on summer flowers, we saw bolts of lightning strike the ground at intervals of only a few seconds. Ransom didn’t appear bothered by this sudden change in the weather. I was, though. In New England, where I live, this sort of meteorological misbehavior is frowned upon. A sudden change from a bright blue sky to a sinister jet-black firmament seems to New Englanders to be rather apocalyptic. But out here, folks accept these climatic extremes as just another part of life.
Like Ransom, High Tail seemed not to notice the sudden atmospheric shift. Using her dexterous lips and well-worn front incisors, she just kept picking and choosing which of those sad-looking tufts of brush she would opt for next.
Surely, I thought, this is no place for a horse. I was thinking of the green pastures of New England and of the beautiful meadows higher up in the Pryors.
“Why is she here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Ransom answered. “There must be a reason. We just don’t know what it is.”
By this time the storm that had charged over the Rockies had brought swiftly plummeting temperatures. Raindrops the size of jelly beans began to fall. The drops changed to hail. We ran for the truck. High Tail just kept on eating. If the Vogelherd horse is the quintessential stallion, High Tail seemed to me to be the horse as survivor, capable and competent, steady and dependable, and able to adapt no matter what life might throw at her.
* * *
Indeed, wild horses are experts at adaptation, whether within the context of their own individual lives or over the generations, evolutionarily speaking. They don’t care about sudden temperature changes, massive hailstorms, frigid weather, dry heat, or falling snow. Horses can live almost anywhere. It takes a lot to bring them down.
To think about this, all you have to do is consider the plentitude of free-ranging horse bands all around the world. No one knows exactly how many such horses roam our planet or even how many regions have free-ranging horse bands, because these horses often find their way into nooks and crannies where humans, even today, rarely tread. Bands of horses can thrive at ten thousand feet above sea level, or on isolated, hurricane-prone Atlantic islands. They can revel in fields of Kentucky bluegrass, or live in deserts, or make do with a diet of sea peas and beach grass.
When I started researching free-roaming horses, I was astonished at their numbers—in the millions. I was also surprised by the variety of ecosystems where the horses not only live, but thrive. There may be more than a million free-ranging horses in the Australian outback alone, living in conditions so unfathomably harsh that they make High Tail’s grazing grounds seem like paradise. The Down Under horses, called brumbies, are tough—maybe even tougher than High Tail. There’s an old horsemen’s myth that horses do not do well in heat, but that’s certainly not the case in the Australian outback, where temperatures can easily top 100 degrees for days at a time. This is certainly evolution at work.
Those horses too fragile to handle life in the outback die young, leaving no offspring. Only the most rugged, independent, and intelligent make it through this purgatory and survive to create the next generation. (Whisper, my street genius, would probably have made it. Gray, maybe not. Or maybe he would have bonded with a buddy as smart as Whisper and thus survived.) The Australian brumbies differ from domestic horses particularly when it comes to their feet. Over the century or so that they have lived in the outback (there were no horses in Australia until a stallion, four mares, a colt, and a filly arrived along with a shipload of English convicts in 1788), they have evolved exceptionally strong hoofs that can cope with constant walking over some very abrasive surfaces. One Australian researcher followed a band that traveled for two days to water where the horses drank their fill, then traveled back for two days to where grazing was available. The researcher saw a newcomer, an escaped domestic horse, join up with this band. He didn’t last long. Unable to keep up the pace, he suffered greatly and died. Evolution sometimes happens this way. The horse probably had many great qualities—but he didn’t have the right qualities to succeed in that particular environment. After Darwin published his theory of evolution in the middle of the nineteenth century, many people interpreted him as having said that only the strong survive. Darwin’s thinking was much more nuanced. While he believed that the “struggle for existence” sometimes involved what he called “warfare” between species, he also understood that, like the poor domestic horse who couldn’t survive in the world of the brumbies, animals not well suited to specific environments simply would not leave offspring. Consequently, a species, given enough time, would change.
It turns out that horses are quite talented at changing as the world around them changes. There are a few other places where horses have adapted to live in exceptionally dry areas. In the Namibian desert in southwest Africa (another place where modern horses did not live until they were brought there by humans), free-roaming horses have thrived in harsh conditions for almost a century. Researchers think they may descend from horses used by German soldiers when the region was a German colony.
All over the American West, free-ranging horses roam in small bands. They even seem to do well in areas around Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places on Earth. You would think that a species that can live in Death Valley would have trouble living in swamps and wetlands, but it turns out that they don’t. A little south of the Namibian desert, another population of horses lives in the Bot River delta of South Africa. And along the Atlantic coast of North America, from Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia north into Canada, horses live on numerous sea islands, including those of North Carolina’s Rachel Carson Reserve and Currituck Banks Reserve, and on Assateague and Chincoteague Islands in Maryland and Virginia. Local lore claims that the ancestors of these horses swam to these islands after the many Spanish shipwrecks that occurred in the region during the 1500s. The equine geneticist Gus Cothran has shown that there is indeed a genetic connection between these island horses and those in Galicia studied by Lagos and Bárcena.
However the horses got to their islands, local people over the centuries let them stay. Such abandonments happen frequently. It’s expensive to keep horses in barns and in paddocks and to feed them; those same horses, left to their own devices, can feed themselves quite adequately. In recent years, in areas of the American West that have experienced economic decline, domestic horses have been abandoned to fend for themselves—a tradition that’s as old as horsemanship itself. In Europe, when the Soviet bloc broke up in 1989 and 1990, before leaving the collective farms where they’d been forced to live, Romanian farmers released their workhorses onto the Danube River Delta, to give the animals a fighting chance at survival. They did much more than just survive. Twenty-five years later, those horses, possibly the world’s newest population of free-roaming horses, now number in the hundreds, and various local factions and international animal welfare groups are fighting with each other over how to manage them.*
* * *
The evolutionary resilience of horses is still manifest in our world today. Fifteen hundred miles west of the Danube River Delta are the famous white horses of France’s Camargue wetlands, widely believed to be one of the world’s oldest free-roaming populations. Some people say these coastal Mediterranean horses derive from Roman stock, but others say the horses have “always” been there, perhaps since the days when Egypt reigned. (Or maybe even longer.)
The Camargue delta is hot, humid, and filled with all kinds of disease-bearing insects. It’s the kind of world where horses shouldn’t be able to live. But they do. What’s even more unexpected is the fact that the Camargue horses are white. Their coloring puts them at greater risk for diseases associated with sunlight, such as skin cancer. (This vulnerability is one reason why European royalty kept white horses: their coat color spoke of the wealth of their owners, who could afford to pamper their horses indoors and feed them, rather than putting them out to graze.)
Scientists who study evolution have long wondered why these horses are white. Wouldn’t evolution have weeded out animals with delicate skin? A hypothesis that white horses are less visible to predators in open marshland than dark-coated horses turned out to be wrong, as did a hypothesis that white coat color kept the horses cooler by reflecting more sunlight.
The answer lay in the presence in the Camargue of immense numbers of very large flies, insects that in great enough numbers can kill a horse. Carriers of infectious diseases, horseflies in great quantity may suck so much blood from a horse that the animal becomes ill. In large enough numbers, horseflies can literally annoy horses to death by preventing them from eating.
The Hungarian researcher Gábor Horváth and his colleagues have found that, in this situation, white horses have an advantage: flies attack white horses substantially less often than dark horses. Horseflies target their prey by following polarized light, in which the photons oscillate up and down in the same direction rather than every which way. Darker horse hairs polarize sunlight more efficiently than lighter horse hairs, so the signal the flies are looking for is stronger when the horses are darker colored. White horse hair polarizes almost no light. Ergo, horseflies bother white horses less.
So why aren’t most free-ranging horses white? In most parts of the world, horses enjoy a number of options when it comes to avoiding horseflies. They can stand on ridgelines where the wind blows, discouraging the insects. They can graze in drier regions during horsefly season. (Dehydration kills the flies.) Or they can stand in cooler areas, also discouraging the flies. But in the Camargue, there are no options. The delta is horsefly paradise, with its perfect trifecta of conditions—the right amount of humidity, the right amount of heat, the lack of wind. Consequently, here the white coat color is an advantage rather than a disadvantage and is, therefore, selected for.
* * *
Like other scientists interested in understanding how systems change over time, Charles Darwin spent much of his life contemplating the adaptability of horses over millions of years, but it’s only recently that science has shown us how evolution has helped horses in the modern era by giving them such flexible genomes. The same species that evolved to live on cold, dry Ice Age plains, like the Vogelherd horse, has also evolved to live on the shores of the Mediterranean in the hot and humid Camargue.
Or consider the case of the sea-island horses who live on Canada’s Sable Island, a small harborless sandbar of an island located far out in the North Atlantic, about a ninety-minute plane flight east from Halifax, Nova Scotia. This tiny island, shaped like a crescent moon, is about thirty miles long and very narrow. Buffeted constantly by violent North Atlantic storms, this island seems an unlikely home for free-roaming horses, yet as many as 450 graze here, surviving by eating beach grass and sea peas. This sounds like a meager diet, but the horses, abandoned there by a Boston entrepreneur before the American Revolution, have endured for more than 250 years.
Predator-free, their numbers rise and fall according to environmental conditions. No one feeds them or takes care of them. Since the 1960s, their numbers have not been culled. The Sable Island horses, in fact, may be the modern world’s only genuinely free-roaming, entirely unmanaged horse population.
The horses are dependent on whatever gifts the sea provides, yet in recent years their numbers have increased. When I met him at the Vienna conference, the Canadian researcher Philip McLoughlin told me, surprisingly, that he suspects that the population explosion of horses may be due to an explosion in seal numbers. It seems that following a global prohibition against seal hunting, several hundred thousand seals now give birth on Sable Island yearly. This pupping, McLoughlin theorizes, with its accompanying deposition of an awful lot of fecal matter, has increased what he calls “sea-to-land nutrient transfer.” In other words, all those seals leave behind a whole lot of nitrogen-rich manure. The manure feeds the plants. The plants feed the horses.
The only non-marine mammals on the island, the horses serve as a real-world laboratory of evolution. Over the centuries, they have become unique. Their pasterns are now so short that, from a distance, their lower legs look something like the legs of mountain goats. The pasterns of most horses are long and angled, allowing for plenty of spring in the horse’s step, which in turn allows for greater speed and stamina when a horse gallops at high speeds over an open plain. Long pasterns evolved as a survival strategy. But longer pasterns also carry an important disadvantage: the pastern’s fragile bones and vulnerable tendons can easily break or strain, laming the horse. Many a racehorse has ended his career because of this vulnerability. But on Sable Island, the horse does not have to run fast to escape predators. Instead, their enemy is deep sand and their worst “predators” are steep, treacherous sand dunes, some almost a thousand feet high, which the horses must climb in order to eat. These dunes provide some pretty dangerous footing for horses. On Sable Island a horse is much more likely to injure a leg while descending these steep dunes than by running along the island’s beaches. Still, a hungry horse must ascend and descend these obstacles.
Consequently, evolution has made a clear choice, just as in the Camargue region. Sable Island horses have shorter, less vulnerable pasterns, giving them that goatlike look. Over 250 years, natural selection has opted for shorter pasterns, improving the horses’ ability to graze, thus improving the horses’ ability to live longer and produce more offspring. We often think of evolution as complicated, but in this case, the process is pretty easy to grasp.
The Sable Island horses are also behaviorally unusual. Worldwide, many horse bands share their home ranges with other bands. Although the bands don’t travel together, their ranges often overlap, leading to the squabbling Ransom and I watched in the Pryor Mountains. While the horses constantly argue and fuss with each other, normally they don’t drive the other bands away from specific grazing areas. They are not territorial.
On Sable Island, however, they are very territorial. Island resources are limited. Under these conditions, the horses stake out territories which they defend from other bands. Rather than sharing grazing opportunities, McLoughlin has found, the horses divide the island into three distinct territories: the western end, with its rich grazing and year-round freshwater pond; the middle area, with poorer grazing and ponds that are often full; and the eastern end, with very poor grazing and almost no surface water. The horses on the eastern end must use their hoofs to dig holes into the sand to reach freshwater. The horses on the island’s western end do not allow the horses from the eastern end into their territory. In effect, the horse bands have formed hierarchies, giving new meaning to the concept of a stratified population of upper, middle, and lower classes.
Elsewhere in the world, other populations of horses have evolved other unusual environment-dependent survival strategies. Siberian horses living in the Yana River region, near the Arctic Circle, sometimes called Yakut horses, are said to enter a kind of quiescence in the winter. During the summer, the horses graze constantly on steppe grasses, storing up calories in a subcutaneous fat layer. In the winter, the horses survive by slowly burning this fat, by breathing only half as much as they do in the summertime, it is said, and by standing quietly without exerting themselves whenever possible. Villagers think of this as a kind of semi-hibernation.
Innovation is a never-ending process. Around the world, wherever they live, given enough time, horse bands tend to become distinct entities, well-honed to the world they inhabit. Watching them is an invitation to fall in love with their backstories—not just of individual animals, but also of their long-term evolution.
The domestic horse is a generalist, bred by us for millennia according to our own wishes in order to meet our own needs. One reason why this has worked so well for us is because of the horse’s evolutionary malleability. We’ve been blessed by this flexibility. We’ve been able to breed huge Shire horses, capable of carrying knights into battle; quarter horses with heavy haunches who can spin on a dime; light-boned trotting horses who can pull carriages; and lithe ponies able to jump high fences despite their short legs.
Where did all these qualities come from? We do know that Equus, our modern horse and “the best running animal on the planet,” according to the paleontologist Darrin Pagnac, appeared at least 4 million years ago. But he’s a marvel descended from 56-million-year-old ancestors who arrived on our planet in a far different form. Since that time, he has been shaped and reshaped by tens of millions of years of global heat spikes, fluctuating ice ages, tectonic upheavals, volcanic mega-explosions, and many other planetary forces until, today, he has mastered the art of adjusting. Extremely intelligent, he can fend for himself in the most challenging environments or be coddled in our barns, pastures, and twenty-first-century cities. He can, like Whisper, learn new skills and cope with problems even when the barn manager, like me, leaves much to be desired.
“Horses today,” Ransom once told me, “occupy an anthropogenic niche. They’ll live wherever we let them live. If you give them enough space, they’ll figure it out.”
* * *
One long-ago afternoon in California’s Death Valley, I watched two free-ranging horses standing very still, trying to weather the midday sun. Death Valley is named for the potential effect of its blistering heat, and when temperatures are at their worst, you want to put a damp cloth over your face when you breathe to keep from searing your lungs. The horses stood stock-still, surrounded by hot sand. Under the merciless sun, I understood their behavior. Like them, I moved as little as possible.
It was too dry for horseflies, but some insect was bothering the animals. They stood head to rump, a bonded pair, swishing their tails back and forth to help each other out. I’d seen this behavior a thousand times before in my life and never given it more than a passing thought until then.
But something struck me that day. Despite the miserable heat, I wasn’t alone. Other horse watchers were there. It was then that I realized what an inestimable gift horses are to people in the modern world and how bereft we would be without them. Even today, long after that ivory carver created the Vogelherd masterpiece, we take so much pleasure in watching wild horses that, all around the world, we let them roam free, giving them their own unique status—part wildlife, part domestic livestock, part companion animal, part guide into the mysterious world of nature. We need horses in our lives.
In one barn where I rode, a retired couple brought their rescued horse with them for a few weeks of vacation. I thought this so charming that I asked them about it. It turned out they never went anywhere without their horse. He was so deeply bonded to them that he became overwrought if they weren’t there. I suspected that the partnership was a two-way street and that the process of caring for the animal, which in their case involved an elaborate two-hour daily grooming ritual (he had his nostrils and ears sponged out daily and in the course of this enjoyed many carrots), was equally soothing to them.
Every morning the husband and wife showed up to brush the horse, clean his teeth, and wash his eyes. They talked to him and handed him treats. Apart from the Lipizzans I visited at Vienna’s Spanish Riding School, this gelding was the cleanest horse I’d ever seen. He was rarely ridden, but when he was, the wife rode the local trails on the horse’s back and the husband accompanied them on his motorcycle. The parade was a wonder to behold.
Horses evoke something ineffable in the human psyche, something at once both exciting and calming. Just looking at a painting of horses, on a museum wall or on a cave wall, can be heart-stopping. Their presence in our lives makes the world so much more grand, even if we only see them from a distance. When the U.S. National Park Service wanted to remove some horses from protected riverbanks in the impoverished Missouri Ozarks, the mountain people objected. The horses themselves were nothing unusual, having apparently found their way onto national parkland after being abandoned by farmers during the worst days of the 1930s Depression. These horses were just like the horses that locals had in their own barns and pastures. But still, many in the region wanted the horses left alone. They found comfort in their presence.
“As long as the wild horses continue to roam,” said one man, “then maybe there’s hope for us as well.”
Perhaps this is the significance of the horses created by the Ice Age artists: They represented hope. And just simple companionship. What are the roots of such a partnership?
Copyright © 2015 by Wendy Williams
Map copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward