A slight digression from the usual practical, hands-on stuff. Like everyone, I also have my spiritual side and this is the Summer Solstice, when the Year Turns and we move from increasing daylight to increasing darkness again, going down to the Dark Times of Midwinter once more. I’m a fair way north and the contrasts are fairly obvious – at Midwinter we see dawn after 9am and sunset before 4pm, and right now we have perhaps an hour of nearly-darkness after the sunset fades from the north-western sky before the predawn colours start to show in the north-east. I like to mark these important points of the year – the equinoxes, the balancing points when light and dark are equal, and the solstices when the wheel turns from one direction to another – with meditations on deeper matters, whether moral, ethical or spiritual or some combination of them all.
I’m on a workshop this weekend – Alexandra Kurland is a clicker trainer, an operant conditioning trainer, of horses (and other animals) and I know from past experience that she’s a about a lot more than just ‘horse do x, click, treat, rinse, repeat’. She listens to horses, respects them, waits for them to be ready to respond and, rather than being a ‘trainer’, I think she’s a conversationalist. She works with horses, she doesn’t just train them.
We’ve just had the pre-course get-together to do the meet and greet thing, and I noticed during our potted intro spiels that we have a couple of people along who are ‘trainers’ .
‘I started out clicker training my dog and that was great, then I clicker trained my cat, and my pet mouse, and someone else’s horse….’
Whoa! Why? Did they need to be taught to do something specific or are you just enjoying manipulating other creatures?
There’s a line here for me.
When a horse (or any creature) needs to learn something specific for health or welfare reasons, that’s one thing. I will train George to wear a rug against midges because otherwise he’s going to experience terrible itching, rub himself raw and end up suffering horrific self-inflicted damage. That’s reason enough to deliberately set out to control his behaviour whether or not he consents, whether or not he likes wearing rugs (which he doesn’t) and whether or not I think he looks dinky in an all-over midge suit (I don’t think he will).
I will offer the horses things to do where they can work with me if they think it’s fun, or find it interesting, or just want to do stuff with me, any of which might happen to be useful to me one day – such as them getting into a trailer without panicking in case I have to transport them for veterinary reasons, or to shift them from one place to another, or teaching them to pick carrots out of carrier bags so they’re not spooky about bags in hedges if I’m riding one of these days. Or stand in hula hoops just because ‘if I stand here, that daft woman’s going to hand me something tasty’.
What I won’t do is manipulate an animal’s behaviour just because I can. That’s pandering to my ego, not caring for the welfare of my non-human companions.
The gates are open and if the horses don’t want to stand in a hula hoop, they can just walk off and do their own thing. That’s fine. That kind of ‘training’ – even Abe accepting me walking up and down stacks of blocks without swivelling round to stare – is done consensually. If it takes ten minutes or ten weeks or never happens at all, it doesn’t matter (though the mounting block thing is going to work because he’ll get bored of watching me scamper up and down like a demented goat). Even George’s tenacious determination not to let people mess with his feet easily actually isn’t that bad, because he self-trims his hooves fantastically well and they are checked every 6 weeks, albeit from a couple of yards rather than a few inches. If it was necessary to get his feet reshaped for health reasons, I’d get it done even if I had to get a vet to knock him out and roll him upside down to do it!
Abe’s Silly Walk is something he spontaneously produced and I merely encouraged – I didn’t make him do it (as Spanish Walk is traditionally taught by tapping a horse’s legs with a whip to create discomfort and make them move) and if he doesn’t want to, which sometimes happens when I give him the cue, I don’t insist, I just move on to something else.
What this boils down to is the important principle of power. Because of the way the world is, the critters here are in my power – they are confined, they rely on me for food, for water, for stimulation and exercise, for a safe place to live. Legally I have the power of life and death over them – I can have them put down, or just kill them. I do kill rabbits and quail for food, that’s one of the reasons I breed them. I ensure they have the best life I can manage, I take care to kill them as quickly and humanely as I can, and I only kill for food, whether mine, the ferrets’ or the dogs’. I don’t waste anything when I butcher something I’ve killed, either – that would be wasting a life. I appreciate it’s not possible for most and I’m not trying to preach, but I feel that if I can’t take that responsibility to care for a creature in life, kill it humanely and make the best use of its body afterwards, I have no right to eat its meat or wear its skin. I won’t eat meat that hasn’t been raised, killed and butchered with respect and care, which is why I don’t eat meat from supermarkets. (There are a couple of superb butchers in the area, however, who can tell you where a piece of meat came from, who raised it, what it ate, how old it was and, if it’s wild game, who killed it where – and it’s all within a few miles of the shop. I will buy from them).
What I’m meditating on here, however, is not the existence of power, but the exercise of power. I can either exert power over – or I can use power to. ‘Power over’ is a manipulative, controlling thing, it’s putting chickens in small cages because it’s more efficient, cutting pigs’ tails and teeth off so they can’t express their emotional distress by maiming each other, granting more oil drilling licences because it keeps people in work and voting for the politicians currently paying mere lip service to ‘climate emergency’ even though it’s going to worsen climate change and the mass extinction we’re currently experiencing. ‘Power to’ is consensual and enabling, it’s compromising on what ‘I’ want and aiming instead for ‘we’. ‘Power to’ cares, even if it means a bit more work for me. ‘Power to’ doesn’t seek ‘my’ goals but delights in what someone else achieved because I could help them achieve it. ‘Power to’ is thrilled tonight because George has just achieved a new skill in his mental toolkit – he’s learned he can ignore me when I speak to him and he’s not in the mood, he doesn’t have to warn me off (admittedly, he’s been quite capable of ignoring me outside all along – but close up in the barn together, when I could just reach out and touch and with both Abe and Dancer sharing the haynet, he’s touchy and jealous and, until now, inclined to wave his teeth at everyone all round). I’ll also point out that I don’t have much to do with this milestone for him, except I was there for him to look at and then ignore!
That’s one of the big reasons I wanted to set this place up so the horses could be as autonomous as possible, able to choose where they go (admittedly, in a relatively limited area) and when, who they socialise with, what they eat. I can’t do that for most of the critters – the dogs would go off hunting and get hurt, the rabbits and quail would quickly be killed by predators, the geese might wander onto the road, the ferrets would stray off and get lost – but the horses can exercise self-will safely within the barns and field, so I arranged it that way. It does slow up what I do by way of persuading them to carry me around, or let me mess with feet and heads and so forth, because I respect their autonomy and if they want to walk off, I don’t stop them. Apart from the afternoon meal and necessary outside appointments (vet, hoof trimmer) I don’t bring them in, rather I wait for them to come in and be interested in me. I pay attention to their body language – if Poppy sees me coming and turns her head towards me with a little nicker, she wants attention and will enjoy being groomed. If she stops chewing hay and freezes I know I’m not wanted, so I say hello in passing and move right on by. Abe’s even more direct – when he wants attention, I find his nose down my ear or his front hoof doing the gentle bum-poke. Dancer will start nibbling on me when she wants me, and George arrives to loom over me with pricked ears (as opposed to the ears-back loom that means ‘you’re in my way, bog off’) If they’re busy being horses and not interested in me just now, fair’s fair, there’s times I’m busy doing human things and not available for them.
This weekend, then, I’m going to be working hard to learn new strategies and skills that might help me communicate better with my non-human companions…. but I won’t be ‘training’ them. I’ll be ‘working with’ them.
Except for George and that rug.
Cairnorchies Chronicles 