The Power of the Herd (24 page)

T
rue pastoralists are among the bravest,
savviest leaders you'll ever meet. Not because they're trekking through the wilderness protecting calves from carnivores — though that's certainly part of the job — but because, from a very young age, these people learn to move with uncommon ease, power, vigilance, and grace among large herds of potentially dangerous animals.

The key word here is
herd.
Milking a cow or riding a well-trained Thoroughbred takes more nerve and skill than most people imagine, but negotiating with a group of gregarious herbivores demands an entirely different set of social competencies. When you step out of the saddle, you realize that all those horses could run you over or break your leg with a single anemic kick. Those steers calmly milling around the pasture could easily skewer you with their horns and toss you like a rag doll. Most of the time, they wouldn't mean to do serious damage. It's just that you happen to be a lot smaller and slower than they are. But if you play on their turf, you need to play by their rules, and that means you damn well better develop a stellar combination of assertiveness, mindfulness, and sensitivity to nonverbal cues. The good news is that the interspecies socialization skills used by pastoral cultures actually
uplift
the intelligence of the entire herd, resulting in behavior so coordinated, so sophisticated, it baffles the modern sedentary mind.

Take Africa's Fulani herdsmen, the pastoral equivalent of a high-wire act operating without a safety net. These nomadic northern Nigerian tribes have no fences to corral their cattle and no horses to help round them up. To raise the difficulty level, the Fulani must keep their animals from wandering into
fenceless fields of grain, as the pastoralists raise their own crops during the rainy season and, at times, migrate through farmlands at the end of the drought season — when the herds are especially lean and hungry. And then there are the animals themselves. Crowned with long, piercing horns, even the cows can be fierce, and the massive white bulls are doubly intimidating.

The average Fulani herdsman faces a seemingly impossible task. He can't physically overpower his cattle with herding sticks and ropes, but he has to stand up to them. He can't outrun them or confine them, but he has to keep them together. And somehow, he has to convince them to orbit the tribe during its travels across the vast and sometimes treacherous African savannah. So it is no small miracle that in the Nigerian outback, you might run into a Fulani herdsman jogging back to camp at sunset with twenty cows and a couple of bulls merrily trotting behind him — in single file or two abreast! This impressive feat has less to do with taming, training, and restraining the animals than with inserting an entire tribe into the cattle social system, transforming the behavior of both species in the process.

In their 1979 article “Applied Ethology in a Nomadic Cattle Culture,” researchers Dale F. Lott and Benjamin L. Hart describe the insights they gained studying the Fulani as
“a two-species social system,”
viewing the culture's unusually sophisticated herding techniques “against a backdrop of bovine social behavior.” And it is here that we citified Westerners might finally grasp the hidden nuances of natural group behavior and, upon reflection, discover the keys to an advanced understanding of leadership.

Sedentary cultures control their herds primarily by technological means: fences, barn stalls, halters, yokes, ropes, and bits that, according to Lott and Hart,
deprive “the animal of most of the alternatives
that do not conform to human wishes.” Factory farming is the ultimate example, as chickens, pigs, and veal calves are confined and harvested like vegetables in a greenhouse with no consideration for their needs as sentient social beings.

An alternative approach to restraint
, Lott and Hart reveal, “is to actively select the desired behavior from the animal's own repertoire and evoke that behavior.” This means you have to be influenced by the herd before you have any hope of influencing its members, an astonishing proposition for anyone living in an anthropocentric culture. This is why in “European and North American farming, the use of this approach has largely been limited to intimidation or subordination, in which man controls the animals by assuming the role of social dominant.”

Many managers, teachers, parents, preachers, and politicians assume this same role when trying to influence people, of course, illustrating how limited our leadership repertoire has become through centuries of hierarchical, command-and-control models and various physical, psychological, and social restraints designed to rein in humans. But what's the alternative?

Consider, first of all, why we even have to ask this question. Through 5,000 years of conquest, slavery, serfdom, and, in modern times, the efforts of a privileged few to control large populations for profit and convenience, we've limited our own development of optimal social behavior. Yet if nothing else, events of the past 250 years prove that once the old fences fall down and the herd breaks free, rudimentary forms of dominance become impotent. The fact that we keep using these outmoded tools, despite their compromised effectiveness, underlines our current state of arrested development. We are free, and yet we are continually sliding back into old habits, struggling to find a way out of chaos into connection.

Like those feral horses we call mustangs, human refugees from all walks of life — escaped slaves, liberated women, religious and political dissidents, disenfranchised youth, anarchists, peace activists, and disgusted corporate employees — can't help but gather in groups, kicking, rearing, biting, and striving to reclaim their dignity in the outback of human experience. Until people somehow, over time, learn new ways to get along, to graze peacefully, protect each other, raise families, brave the elements, and endure the droughts while seeking, and eventually finding, those mythical greener pastures. The problem is that even the most sincere, potentially innovative groups have trouble collaborating, using their power effectively, and most important, airing differences constructively and respectfully. And so the same cycle of rebellion, conviction, optimism, conflict, shame, blame, hostility, disempowerment, and disillusionment starts up again in whatever “new world” the next round of rogues and visionaries hopes to mold into the perfect earthly paradise.

The solution does not hinge on more and better technology — though technology eventually aided and abetted our freedom even as it initially enslaved us as pyramid builders, cotton pickers, and sweatshop workers. In a society where “commoners” can now fly to Europe, drive to Montana, or move to Nebraska and buy a winter condo in Florida, it's simply harder to fence us in these days. With e-commerce gaining unprecedented influence, we don't even need to leave our homes to go to work, lessening the influence of oppressive, slave-driving bosses. And with cell phone cameras instantaneously broadcasting human rights violations to free spirits around the world, dictators are an endangered species. As a result, the very nature of politics is changing — so fast that our current politicians can't keep up.

In
The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World,
Jeremy Rifkin observes that young people raised on the expanded informational possibilities afforded by the Web
“aren't much interested in debating the finer points
of capitalist or socialist ideology or the nuances of geopolitical theory….Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative.”

More specifically,
the “two generations whose sociability
has been formed, in large part, by Internet communications are far more likely to divide the world into people and institutions that use top-down, enclosed, and proprietary thinking, and those that use lateral, transparent, and open thinking.” In essence, Rifkin goes on to explain, “the Internet slayed machismo,” leaving future generations to imagine new forms of leadership as “the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.” At the dawn of the third industrial revolution, oddly enough, Pyotr Kropotkin's vision of free, empowered people living in decentralized systems has gained an unexpected boost through an invention he couldn't have imagined in his wildest, pre–Russian Revolution dreams!

“The collaborative power unleashed by the merging
of Internet technology and renewable energies is fundamentally restructuring human relationships,” Rifkin emphasizes, “from top to bottom to side to side, with profound implications for the future of society.” Whether we like it or not, life in the twenty-first century demands unprecedented levels of emotional and social intelligence. Yet as all those rigid statues of conquerors past crash to the ground, we don't need more social-networking programs. What we really need is a dose of Abel's wisdom, an honest-to-goodness sabbatical from all the wonders that our cities do in fact hold.

In other words, we need to develop new leadership models to support authentic, empowered, transparent, collaborative communities. Luckily we don't have to completely reinvent the wheel. Many of these skills are hidden in far, far older forms of social organization, the nuances of which history failed to record because they were most efficiently accessed in the company of beings who cannot speak, let alone text…

First of all, let me clarify that the goal here is not to tear down all possible fences, fire every last CEO, and obliterate New York City and Washington, D.C., Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style. Distilled to its most basic premise, Abel's
orientation stresses a thoughtful, caring, reverent
interdependence
between humanity and nature, traditionally through associations with nonpredatory animals who maintain a modified yet still satisfying social life of their own. This creates an interspecies culture in which the humans are influenced by the herd as much as the herd is influenced by the humans.

Since you're likely a stranger to this lifestyle, let's start our nomadic back-country journey by exploring a familiar concept, dominance, from a pastoralist's perspective. First stop: a visit with the Fulani tribes.

As Lott and Hart reveal,
these expert herdsmen “may be thought of as
taking a social role such as a dominant or a herd leader. Yet it may be more precise to describe them as exploiting the predispositions of cattle to yield to a dominant and to follow a leader.” Now that might sound redundant, but here's the clincher: the “dominant” and the “leader” are literally
different animals.

A dominant cow or bull asserts authority by keeping other animals away from something desirable: food, water, females in heat, and so on. This most rudimentary form of alpha responds to the slightest hint of disrespect with immediate, sometimes outlandish, corrections. On the upside, he or she also gains respect by breaking up fights between herd members. But sometimes a dominant animal will charge others for no apparent reason, keeping everyone a bit on edge. As a result, the group gives such individuals lots of space, looking away while preparing to move away whenever the saucy cow or big bad bull approaches. This, however, makes it hard for the dominant to lead anyone, anywhere.

Herd members capable of rallying the troops, on the other hand, exhibit the characteristics of what horse trainer Mark Rashid calls the “passive leader,” though as I originally mentioned in
chapter 5
, that term is somewhat misleading. The passive leader only appears passive to someone raised on the flamboyant, fear-producing intimidation tactics most aggressively displayed by adolescent alpha males, who are more often than not expelled from the herd until they learn to calm down and respect others. Which is why in nature, young stallions, bulls, and male elephants roam in bachelor bands of heavily scarred individuals. And even within the most skillful pastoral cultures, only a few carefully selected males reach sexual maturity; others become geldings, oxen, steers — or supper.

The herd leader is a much more balanced individual who conserves energy for true emergencies. Certainly no pushover, he or she knows how to set boundaries without causing others unnecessary stress. Such an animal often reveals his or her potential early in life through a paradoxical combination of independence and sociability — only in this case, it's truly more of a passive sociability. Others gravitate to this calm yet still charismatic herd member,
orbiting like moons around this individual's intriguing combination of curiosity, poise, and good-natured alertness (as opposed to hypervigilance). While the leader enjoys company, he or she also exhibits a kind of take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the herd dynamics others seem so invested in, content to wander off languidly to investigate something new. Others trot over to check out what piqued his or her interest, causing the rest of the herd to follow in due course.

The easiest way to distinguish a leader in the making is to take each animal out for a stroll while the others remain confined. The individual most willing to move forward, enthusiastically and without looking back — whose absence at the same time inspires the greatest distress, even panic, in the rest of the herd — is your winner.

And then there's what Meg Daley Olmert characterizes as the glue that holds the herd together: oxytocin, that potent biochemical bonding agent that encourages connection and affection — enhanced through companionship, mating, nursing, mutual grooming, resting quietly together, playing, and moving in harmony.

Nurturers, companions, leaders, and dominants are all crucial to herd co-hesiveness. Members tend to play more than one role, though rarely all four. The thing about being human among animals ten times your size is that you really do need to perform all these roles well to become a master herdsman, especially in the great unfenced backcountry where freedom abides.