Do horses ask questions?

A new brown mare is on the yard. She was pacing around her box and I thought, literally, "unsettled." Was it a signal that I read – or was it a "condition"? 

She was put into a central pen while her stable was being cleaned, and tied by a halter rope attached to a string on the fence line. She was pacing back and forth on the end of the rope, which I found difficult to ignore. 

I went and stood near her head. She was holding it high and looking around her. It was clear that the simple fact of my presence was not what she wanted, and she barely stopped what she was doing while I stood there. I began to walk around the outside of the small pen she was in, touching the posts and rails, checking the perimeter. This was something I used to do as a matter of course when I began my training as an equine facilitated psychotherapist (see earlier post, Klaus part 1). I suppose she noticed but I don't know what effect it had on her. Nevertheless, it gave me time to think. It allowed me to change what was going on in my mind. By the time I had gone round twice, I became conscious of a new idea forming in my mind. I could do what I had learned from Sharon Wilsie: follow the mare's attention, imitate her gesture and respond to it with a gesture that another horse (a mentor, perhaps) might give.

What does that mean? When the brown mare looked in a particular direction with her head high, I looked that way too, stood up straight and pointed. I saw a row of sleepy peaceful heads of some other horses standing at their stable doors. I turned to the brown mare, looked her in the eye, then flicked my wrist in a gesture of dismissal in the direction of the row of horses standing at their stable doors. I blew out a short puff of breath as if to say, "They are all ok, never mind them" and I dropped my hand to my side, with a small gesture that mimics a horse's tail swish as if to say: "You don't have to think about them." She dropped her head, then turned, raised her head again, and looked alertly at another row of horses. So I did the same thing. She dropped her head again; then it went up again, alert, as she watched someone wheeling a barrow across the yard. I did the swish thing again. We did this maybe four or five times, and I continued following her lead until she dropped her head lower and sauntered over to look at me and sniff my hand thoroughly and deliberately. She breathed in my scent first with one nostril, then the other, and looked at me as she did so. It was as if this time she was registering me in her mind as someone who could and would listen to her, and who she could listen to in turn. 

As I reflected on this later and talked it over with some of my psychoanalytic colleagues, it occurred to me that there were two things going on. Perhaps it wasn't only that she was distressed at being in a new and unfamiliar place – although that seems reasonable – there seemed to be something else, another layer. It was also as if she was calling for an interlocutor, a partner who might mediate her new surroundings for her. My colleague interpreted: it was like a question, she said. Yes. It was like a question, a part of the structure of language, but there seemed to be two parts to the question. First, is it safe here? Second, is there anyone here who recognises that this is something that needs to be attended to? In a herd, there is a horse whose job it is to do precisely that. A kind of sentry duty. A function.

But perhaps a third point is worth drawing out. The communication was done via an active, visible sign using the body. It was not transmitted unconsciously, subliminally, via heartbeat, via thought transfer, via breathing rate or any of those other things that I had read about during my EFP course. It was a clear repetition of a basic sign which was read by the horse from the gestures of a human. I would add that it was not automatic, either. There was something like judgement going on in her mind. Hard for a human to say what that might be, but it seemed to involve something like a decision on her part. 

The owner of the stables had taught me a lesson a few weeks earlier that has something to do with this. We were riding together and were approaching a wood. She offered a few words of advice: "Your horse will be on the lookout for unexpected dangers in here." I leant forward and patted his neck. She said, "He is not unsure of his ability to take care of himself, he is unsure of your ability to take care of the situation." This seems to support the idea that the brown mare might not simply have been alert to the potential dangers of the new environment, but was trying to discover whether there was someone else looking out for her. Or simply someone who would listen.