The Power of the Herd (33 page)

In the film, no information was given on these other horses, where they were kept, or how the woman ended up with so many of them, though Buck gently scolded her for what he, and the vast majority of experienced equestrians, would perceive as a naively idealistic addiction to stallions. Buck told the woman that she needed to take a look at her desire to have so many of these wild and powerful males in her life, emphasizing that horse problems mirrored the handler's unresolved issues. But as a horse trainer, not an equine-facilitated
therapy specialist, Buck was powerless to offer his client support in this area. His conversation with her involved little more than a few shaming statements, a hint of empathy, and no real solutions for the palomino who, during the documentary at least, was presented as too far gone to help.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear:
most
of us are powerless in these situations. As we emerge from five thousand years of slavery, dominance, and submission, we don't yet have the skills to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and heal the trauma that humans experience as often as horses in our current system, sometimes in war, sometimes as orphans, sometimes through parental abuse like Buck Brannaman faced as the child of a violent father. We're just now learning how to heal the emotional, psychological, and spiritual wounds of the past, how to cultivate power in nonpredatory ways, and how to compassionately support others on this quest. In this respect, no horse whisperer, teacher, counselor, or spiritual leader has all the answers, magically transforming pain and confusion into clarity and peace.

To solve these complex problems, we must engage in
consensual
leadership (Guiding Principle 10,
chapter 22
), which means “sensing together,” ideally tapping the expertise of experienced and compassionate people in multiple disciplines, analyzing what works and what doesn't — without shame, blame, power plays, or sarcasm. As a culture and as a species, we also need to change our perspective on troubleshooting, welcoming periods of wu-wei over quickfix solutions, enhanced by the social-intelligence skills needed to collaborate, experiment, and explore the unknown together.

Was the colt too far gone? Watching the admittedly erratic behavior exhibited on-screen, I don't think so. There were a number of positive signals from the horse, some surprisingly successful moments during the first training session (which included a team approach by Buck, the experienced horse he was riding, and a training assistant). There were also some misinterpretations regarding the roots of the colt's aggression, and a disciple-like, method-oriented lack of awareness on the part of the assistant, who got mauled when he was asked to go into the corral alone with the horse while Buck saddled up for a second training session that never happened, at least not on film. Justifiably concerned for the bleeding assistant, the woman decided to put her three-year-old colt down. He was quietly loaded back onto the trailer, and the two drove off into a different kind of sunset.

Based on experience with an even more violent stallion, I was saddened to see that the palomino wasn't given what he needed most at that moment: time and space. I'm not using these words in their usual sense — the frantic, frustrated, mal-socialized animal most certainly did not need six months of
freedom to run amok on pasture. He needed to experience
mutually respectful
boundaries, learning how to respect others' space while also realizing over time that
people would respect his space
when he showed signs of escalating arousal, a still-controversial premise in the mainstream equestrian world. (See Guiding Principle 4,
chapter 16
.) Because the woman did not understand this crucial missing piece, however, her safety was seriously compromised. When Buck made it clear he couldn't fix her horse in a week, the difficult decision she made, while tragic, may have saved her life.

The issues involved were much too complex to address in a workshop designed for preparing conventional riding, showing, and cattle-herding horses to become safe mounts for the average Western rider. Because of initial circumstances beyond anyone's control, this spirited young stallion had been raised to see humans as herd members. In that sense, the orphaned palomino was inadvertently launched on a Fulani-like path, but in a culture that was absolutely clueless regarding the intricacies of interspecies socialization. No wonder he was frustrated and confused. He needed assistance from a master herder in developing physical, mental, and emotional self-control, rather than mindless submission to humans who had no knowledge of the difference between dominance and leadership, let alone between boundaries and assertiveness.

To reach the potential hidden inside this challenge, the golden-haired colt needed at least one mindful, adaptable, empowered advocate who (1) exhibited high levels of his or her own emotional self-control, (2) could recognize which normally beneficial natural-horsemanship methods weren't working and, just as important, which methods
were
working, (3) knew how to solicit and continuously evaluate help from other sources when he or she ran out of ideas, and (4) was willing to endure a particular kind of sharo, the kind in which you're brave and experienced enough to hold your own with a troubled teenager, soldier, or trauma survivor — without indulging, or lashing out at, an individual who is dangerous purely because, one way or another,
he
was injured by life circumstances exacerbated by humanity's lack of emotional and social intelligence.

When I accepted Shawnee Allen's offer to rehabilitate Midnight Merlin in 1999, I wasn't prepared for the many ways he would attack horses and people alike. Initially, I couldn't even walk into his stall and put a halter on him without a serious fight. Whenever I actually succeeded in getting close enough to touch him, he would jerk back and rear as if he'd been shocked by a cattle prod. By that time, it was also clear that the conventional use of saddles, bits, and lead
ropes, and even the free-longing protocols used by natural-horsemanship aficionados like Monty Roberts, Ray Hunt, and Buck Brannaman, intermittently and unpredictably caused a massive escalation in arousal that would send the horse into a blind fury. The trainer who abandoned the stallion in Tucson had employed these techniques with dangerously inconsistent results. (Merlin must have scared the tar out of the man one day, as he suddenly left town, not even bothering to call Shawnee to tell her where the horse was. It took The Ranch's owners several months of research to find out who she was and where she lived.)

I too ran the Merlin gauntlet as I assessed his response to many of these same methods. In observing his behavior over time (well, really more like enduring and surviving his behavior over time), I found the trauma pattern to be “consistently erratic.” Merlin seemed to try, sincerely, to keep it together. He was at times engaged and filled with promise, intelligent, and even enthusiastic about learning something new. Then suddenly, seemingly without warning, he'd trip off into a rage, whereupon he'd either lunge toward the handler, rearing and striking with teeth bared, or pull away and run around so frantically he'd lose his balance and slide on his side, sometimes ten or fifteen feet across the arena into the fence, scraping his hide, lying there for ten minutes covered with sweat, staring blankly as if he'd given up the ghost while his pulse was racing frantically. These tantrums were heartbreaking to witness, and absolutely horrific if you happened to be in there with him.

At the same time, touch was so offensive to Merlin that experienced equine massage therapists, T-Touch specialists, and veterinary acupuncturists couldn't get near him. While the stallion's response to training techniques would send him into an occasional, unpredictable rage, putting your hands anywhere near his hide sent him into an instantaneous, guaranteed rage. To avoid further injury and trauma for the horse, not to mention all the humans involved, I gave into a period of what I can only characterize as
heroic wu-wei
because, for the first week or two, doing nothing
with
Merlin involved a high level of vigilance and some serious self-defense skills.

The strategy seemed simple enough. I decided to see how far away I needed to stand from Merlin in order for the horse to calm down. My goal was to start from this place, and move closer, day by day, inch by inch, until I was finally touching him. Instead, I found that Merlin demanded I stand in the same place day after day, about five feet from his body. If I even leaned in, he would pin his ears and begin to show the first signs of flight-or-fight. So I simplified the goal even further. Thinking that perhaps I would have to stand there until Merlin finally trusted me, I spent ten to thirty minutes each day standing in the corral with the stallion, five feet away from him, holding a whip in a neutral position
in case he decided to attack, which he was progressively less motivated to do. After a week, it seemed like he looked forward to a form of companionship that asked nothing from either of us.

Standing there for days on end, I developed a relaxed yet heightened state of awareness — out of necessity. If I held my breath or tensed my body in any way, Merlin would do the same, which meant he would either move away or attack. In terms of his or my rising physiological arousal, however, it was actually difficult at times to tell “who started it.” Because Merlin's demeanor could change so quickly, it didn't
matter
who started it. I had to address the situation immediately or it would get out of hand. And so I began to think and react not in terms of
who
was afraid, angry, or agitated but more along the lines of assessing
when fear, anger, and/or agitation were present in the horse-human system.
By noticing the slightest rise in my own blood pressure, heart rate, or tension, then immediately adding breath and relaxation while simultaneously holding my ground, I could calm Merlin at a distance of five feet, often without lifting the whip —
if
I noticed the shift in its earliest, most subtle form and took immediate action to calm my own body while simultaneously conveying strength and power.

Talk about the benefits of stallion-induced mindfulness training! It wasn't just about noticing what was happening. It was about sensing, then quickly altering, my own body's response to escalating tension while simultaneously paying attention to another being, calming him in the process. Merlin needed someone who could physically, at a distance, help him modulate his own out-of-control, traumatized nervous system. And by learning to do this for him, I was mastering this ability in myself.

It subsequently became clear what many of the horse-taming tales throughout history were pointing to: the nonverbal, somatic genius of exceptional leaders able to control fear and aggression in large animals and, consequently, in large populations. Think of Washington's horse standing through cannon and musket fire, inspiring hundreds of shoeless soldiers to do the same when every fiber of their being was shouting “Retreat!” Consider the already advanced physical, mental, and emotional self-control Siddhartha would have needed to gentle the enraged stallion he faced in winning Yasodhara's hand in marriage.

In working with horses, the Buddha literally had a leg up in developing important nonverbal skills he drew upon to make that final leap toward enlightenment at age thirty-five, striving over the next forty-five years to teach these life-enhancing mental, emotional, and social-intelligence principles to other people. His sometimes clear and logical, sometimes vague and mystical teachings pointed to a reality that could never fully be translated into words.
From this perspective, it's clear why his program for self-mastery was called the
dharma,
a Sanskrit word characterizing practices that illuminate universal principles interweaving natural phenomena and the human psyche, ultimately creating a dynamic, harmonious interdependence.

In accepting the challenge to heal Merlin, in somehow finding the courage to face this ridiculously dangerous task, my own mind-body awareness was elevated beyond anything I knew was possible. Over the next decade, a slowly progressing, positive feedback loop began to reach fulfillment. As Merlin forced me to stretch beyond my conventional human perceptions, habits, and skills,
he
stretched, the herd stretched, and the other humans in his life began to stretch as well. This was not always an easy path to follow, as I sometimes felt as though we were bushwhacking through cactus in the dead of night. And yet, we evolved in concert with each other, shedding our limiting fears and beliefs to
believe in each other.

Two years after Merlin died at age twenty-three, I came across accounts of the Buddha and Kanthaka, and it struck me that this story could easily represent the first recorded case of mutual evolution between a human and a horse. What if the stallion that Siddhartha so skillfully and compassionately trained had also been training
him,
psychologically as well as physically carrying his master away from the heavily defended, insulated palace of a hierarchical, materialistic father? In the process, the legend specifies, Kanthaka himself moved beyond instinct, further developing his species' natural gifts for nonattachment, for expanded individual and herd awareness, and for nonpredatory power, later becoming enlightened as a student of the fully realized Buddha.

In working with Merlin, I developed a few valuable rehabilitation techniques and a deeper understanding of the horse-human connection, accessing insights I could later teach experientially and sometimes, though not always, translate into words. But acknowledging that we were simultaneously
separate and not separate
was the most powerful and elegant black-horse mystery of all. The Buddha described this principle as “dependent co-arising.” Thich Nhat Hahn called it “Interbeing.” But Merlin gave me a dramatic, direct experience of it when I became humble and patient enough to stand
with
him, waiting not simply for a training solution, as it turned out, but for a transformation of consciousness I had no idea any four-legged creature could inspire.