The Power of the Herd (16 page)

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 non-predatory 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.”

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 may go to church on Sunday and sit through tales of disciples taking up a gentler lifestyle, but when Monday morning arrives the beast rears its ugly head and the rabid carnivore is unleashed once again. For change to occur, the human psyche has to accept another matrix of wisdom capable of balancing the violent nature of the predator inside. Still, with modern humanity's potential for widespread nuclear and environmental destruction, the image of the hunted who outwits a hunter of such monstrous proportions is not likely to be the lamb, a much more innocent manifestation of prey philosophy. But the horse might capture the beast's attention as an innovation of this ideal in its most mature, most elegant, most powerful, most regal manifestation.

When we develop the complementary strengths of predator and prey, the lion transforms from aggressor to protector, from the murderer of sensitivity to its champion, helping us access the courage to feel
and
the willingness to
act. A human who embodies the wisdom of lion
and
horse neither suppresses emotion nor becomes paralyzed by it. She uses her keen prey-animal instincts to sense aggression underneath the toothy smile of a colleague and employs her agile, nonpredatory intelligence to evade trouble without engaging in a carnivorous battle to the death. She holds her ground without ordering everyone else around. She embodies true assertiveness, becoming neither tyrant nor victim. She develops focused, goal-oriented thinking alongside a responsive, heartfelt, process-oriented mind capable of nourishing relationship.

Bringing our predatory nature back into balance is the challenge of a lifetime for individuals, and a multigenerational project for humanity. Luckily, we have living, breathing horses to help us reawaken the wisdom of the prey while demanding that we
own
our inner lion and put it to good use.

If might always made right, and survival of the fittest depended solely on competition and brute force, American revolutionaries could never have defeated the British. As the grossly outnumbered colonial army ran out of guns, food, clothing, shoes, men, and finally, morale, it was nonpredatory wisdom that
repeatedly
turned the tide, challenging widespread, long-standing notions about the nature of power, ultimately paving the way for a truly collaborative society of free men and women.

In this respect, George Washington was at the head of a hidden revolution, changing the face of leadership itself. Early in the war, he blatantly rejected flamboyant, alpha-style dominance tactics in favor of a more thoughtful and compassionate approach, leading by example rather than by intimidation, adopting a role similar to what trainer Mark Rashid calls the “passive leader” in a horse herd. Remember, this is the strong yet steady, collected leader that others choose to follow, one who conserves energy for true emergencies, who doesn't cause the group “unnecessary stress or aggravation,” someone with “quiet confidence, dependability, consistency, and a willingness not to use force.”

As Ron Chernow reveals in his intricate biography
Washington:
A
Life,
the general was consciously evolving a style of leadership the likes of which the world had never seen, working tirelessly to educate and uplift his long-suffering soldiers while dealing with constant assaults from a capricious, inexperienced, in-fighting Continental Congress and a skeptical public. Battling accusations that he was weak and indecisive (accusations by people who either wanted his job or were afraid that his popularity would make him too powerful), he
nonetheless stayed the course, eventually proving himself worthy of the public's trust through the very act of valuing that trust to begin with.

Washington's tenure as commander in chief
featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that
“the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion
.” No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories.
His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.

Rejecting slash and burn, rape and pillage, techniques that the British still used at times, Washington guarded against needless trauma perpetrated by and on friends and foes alike. During those long stretches between battles, he recognized the value of a feminine presence in camp to counteract the despair and disillusionment of an army stretched to the limit, enlisting the support of women, not as prostitutes, but as social activists capable of providing comfort, care, and a host of other essential services to the soldiers. Even on the battlefield, his willingness to adopt a nonpredatory perspective saved the army on more than one occasion and, arguably, won him the war. In this respect, he managed to tame the inner lion of his own naturally aggressive, risk-taking, goal-oriented personality, resurrecting long-forgotten evasion maneuvers used by an ancient nomadic culture three thousand years earlier.

Despite being vastly outnumbered, sometimes three to one, by the British, Washington made several bold attempts to win the war quickly, heroic efforts that ultimately cost lives and territory. Like the ill-fated plan to tame his mother's sorrel colt, a casualty of aggressive teenage idealism, Washington's initial wartime experiments in gutsy, overtly confrontational strategies backfired for the most part. By January 1777, American forces had lost New York City and were about to lose Philadelphia. Colonial troops, which had numbered twenty thousand a year earlier, had dwindled to less than three thousand when
enlistments expired that winter, as did the kind of popular support capable of producing new recruits. As one French observer remarked,
“There is a hundred times more enthusiasm
for the Revolution in any Paris café than in all the colonies together.”

Washington had two choices: surrender or adopt a “Fabian strategy.” Named after Fabius Maximus — a Roman general who, in the third century
BCE
, fought off a much larger enemy force through less-confrontational, defensive tactics — the second option was still hard for Washington to embrace. In
His Excellency,
Joseph Ellis reports that the general had to grapple with his own self-image and long-standing beliefs, finally relenting
“less out of conviction than a realistic recognition
of his limited resources.” As Ellis explains, “A Fabian strategy, like guerilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century, was the preferred approach of the weak. Washington did not believe that he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself. He regarded battle as a summons to display one's strength and courage; avoiding battle was akin to dishonorable behavior, like refusing to move forward in the face of musket and cannon fire.”