Falling In Love With Ethology: The Joy of Unlearning
Bonny Mealand
On a remote island at the edge of the Atlantic in the midst of a gale-swept sea, where vibrant greens contrast with stoic grey in a dramatic clash of grass and rock, my career took an unexpected turn. The journey by boat introduced an element of unpredictability right from the start. The rolling waves and strong winds made the landing far from certain. I didn’t realise it at the time but the voyage itself played a part in preparing me for the work I was there to do. Embracing flexibility and acceptance in the face of the unknown helped lay the groundwork for what became a life-changing experience. The inhabitants of the island would inspire a quest that would reshape not only my approach to horses but to every aspect of my life.
The task I faced on the far shore was daunting: to attend and trim the overgrown hooves of over 40 free-living ponies. Skittish and wary, many of the ponies were either unhandled or previously mistreated. Meeting these ponies where they lived marked the beginning of a significant unlearning process, shattering an overconfident belief in my abilities to handle and train horses. It was because of this humbling experience that I discovered the beautiful complexity of horses.
I had always imagined life-changing horses would be like film stars – beautiful, dramatic, and commanding attention. In reality, the most profound lessons often come from those who fly under the radar. In my case, a mob of little grey ponies – small, scruffy, and wary of humans – turned out to be my greatest teachers; they led me to question everything I thought I knew and to seek a totally different way of seeing and understanding horses. These ponies became my touchstone.
Amidst rickety facilities and the chaos of unhandled ponies, and with the intense time pressure I faced, I realised that all my previous techniques would fail me here on the island. I’d have to find a new way if I was to get the job done. This sparked my curiosity, and I took time to study the ponies before attempting to continue. I began to notice how they behaved with each other, how they explored together and how they communicated. The ways they diffused anxiety and created peace and harmony. It became clear that the essence of their lives was in awareness of each other and social cohesion, and this sprang dynamically from what transpired between them individually and as a group. This observation led to a lightbulb moment: I should simply follow their lead to the best of my ability – relate to them as they would with each other.
James Bridle writes, ‘what matters resides in relationships rather than things – between us, rather than within us’.[1] I realised that trust, the foundation of all relationships, requires effort, understanding, and a shared sense of safety. This was what the remote island ponies shared. They were wary of humans (and surely with good reason), but the gentle and harmonious bonds they shared with each other shone like beacons on a tempest-tossed sea.
Safety, both physical and emotional, quickly became a fundamental principle in my work and my understanding of horses altogether. In order to develop my ability to work with wild, unhandled and even poorly handled horses (whether free-living or domestic), I needed to learn to better understand horses on their own terms. For this, I turned to equine ethology and, in particular, the study of free-living and wild equines in their natural environments.
Equine ethology, the study of animals in the environments they have evolved to inhabit, has become the cornerstone of my work, providing profound insights and fundamental principles that have shaped my work. A thorough understanding of how horses perceive the world, the importance of their social lives, and what matters to horses is vital if we want to build mutually beneficial relationships with them. The ethological study has provided a clear path to that information for me.
This most fundamental understanding of horses seems to be missing from what we are traditionally taught about horses. Or, as my friend likes to put it, ‘we want to jump to lesson B without first learning lesson A’. We want to ride, jump, and get our horses to perform complex movements before we have integrated what their bodies can do and why. We expect certain behaviours without understanding the context in which these behaviours might arise. We literally put the cart before the horse! In the absence of knowing what normal behaviour is for horses, we are left without a blueprint, a baseline understanding to help us evaluate.
In the domestic horse world, we often find ourselves flying blind, imposing outdated and inappropriate living conditions and training methods on horses without considering their needs or what makes sense to them. A photo of a palatial stable may appear appealing to us, but it can mask the anxiety and desperation of a social creature confined in a solitary pen. We are drawn in by beautiful photos of beaming human faces, not noticing the distress etched upon the face of the horse standing beside them. We focus so much on our own, and human experiences in general, that we’ve lost sight of horses themselves.
By watching horses with each other, I learned that to establish a connection based on safety and trust, it is necessary to acknowledge and understand their emotions. It takes proximity and time and a deep and open sense of curiosity about the other. Overtraining, I discovered, can mask anxiety rather than eliminate it, because it dismisses the horse’s experience. I vowed to keep horses at the heart.
Spending time with horses living the life they’ve evolved for, cultivating this ethological perspective, has been a turning point for me and my work with horses. It has offered insights into their authentic lives, unburdened by human bias. Ethology provides a blueprint to understand what it is to be a horse and reveals their ‘telos’, a term coined by the late veterinary ethicist Prof. Bernard Rollin.[2] Telos is the set of distinctive traits and powers that allow the animal to function and thrive in the environments they are adapted to. It includes their physical, social, cognitive and emotional lives and is one of the most profound means of assessing welfare. A good life for horses is one that allows them to fulfil or satisfy their telos, a life that suits their characteristic nature.
One of the most powerful things we can do for our horses is to see and understand horses from their own perspective. My journey has now spanned years of observing equines in their many and varied natural habitats, from the UK to Spain, Mongolia and Zimbabwe. I have witnessed their peaceable nature, and how they prioritise the stable social connections and deep bonds which are crucial for their safety and survival. It is a journey that has involved significant unlearning, stepping outside our human-centric worldview to embrace the joyous practice of ethology. When we enter the horse’s world in a curious and gentle way, applying the art and science of observation, our horses really do become our best teachers, and we become equipped with the knowledge and ability to provide a better life for them.
Change our perspective, change the world!
References:
- Bridle, James. Ways Of Being (2022) – https://jamesbridle.com/books/ways-of-being
- Prof. Bernard Rollin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Rollin