Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  The father of the babies is Jumbo II, whom Liz met at the Pan-American Exposition twenty-two months ago. It is said that Jumbo II is at the present time dying of blood poisoning in Cleveland, Ohio.

  And November 29, in Billboard, some of which is probably true:

  Jumbo II, the big elephant belonging to Bostock, which had been left behind at Manhattan Beach, Cleveland, O., last summer, on account of a creditor’s attachment, is no more.

  About a week ago he showed signs of sickness.

  WILBUR: I just don’t understand it!

  ED: Don’t try to. It’s bigger than both of us.

  CLEVER HANS

  According to Herr von Osten, it began with a kitten, a bear cub, and a horse. The retired teacher spent weeks grabbing their furry appendages and tapping them on the courtyard floor one-two-three, while saying the numbers aloud—one-two-three, one-two-three—hoping something might stick in an animal’s brain. The kitten and bear were useless, but the horse seemed to figure it out.

  Hans learned to tap his right hoof one-two-three, then to double one-two-three on command by tapping six times, then to subtract five and tap only the one. Then, with the epic patience reserved for a wayward schoolboy, Herr von Osten went further. It took years, but he taught the horse fractions, then decimal places, then colors and days of the week. The alphabet as permutations of taps on a special handmade platform box. Tones in the musical scale as taps. Tapping the differences between straw hats and felt ones, and scores of other human practices rarely shared with “the lower forms.”

  Soon, his North Berlin courtyard was packed every noontime. Gentlemen on lunch breaks, truant delivery boys, and ladies shaded by parasols all squeezed close to the tall Orlov Trotter, with Herr von Osten nearby in his long coat and slouch hat. He often prompted onlookers to question the horse themselves, reminding them their inquiries must be gently voiced:

  What are the factors of forty-nine?

  If the third day of the month comes on a Wednesday, what day and date is a fortnight after?

  Is this a pleasing chord? No? Then which tone should I omit?

  I’m thinking of a number. If I subtract four from it, I have eighteen. What number is in my mind?

  A state-sanctioned posse of zoologists, viscounts, and circus men came to the courtyard to debunk the act, but they debunked nothing. By then, the world was watching; papers in Europe and all the way to North America ran the story of “BERLIN’S WONDERFUL HORSE: He Can Do Almost Anything but Talk.” Even the Hans Commission’s circus pro, who knew a thing or two about trick horses, confessed his shock. Herr Von Osten, they agreed, was an honest horseman; their poking around Hans revealed no sign of fraud. They told the papers that the nine-year-old gelding must have the brain of a twelve-year-old human child.

  In the very distant past, when our world was unrecognizable, human and horse brains matched. We don’t know exactly when this was—somewhere in a span of about thirty-four million years—but once upon a time, we were identical: small, ratlike, and vertebrate, with sharp mouths and sensitive eyes, thinking as one, hiding in the underbrush of our strange and green planet from the giant beasts that owned it. And then an asteroid hit, almost everybody died, the lush green became mottled with fruits and flowers, and as we ate them, our bodies changed. We slunk out from the underbrush and became many creatures, each one lost in its own thoughts.

  The psychologist on the Hans Commission sent one of his lab assistants, named Herr Pfungst, back to the courtyard for more exhaustive trials. Herr Pfungst erected a tent and banished the crowds; eventually, he banished Herr von Osten, too. He blinkered Hans, deafened him, plugged his nose, and asked him backward questions. It took months, but the man finally found a pattern. If Hans couldn’t see his interrogator, he couldn’t answer correctly. The horse would search for the voice asking the question, chew the air, and then give his default response of one-two-three. Other times he’d just keep tapping the hoof-box like an uncertain metronome. Herr Pfungst discovered that if the question was rigged so the human could ask it without knowing the answer, the horse always tapped incorrectly. There was something about the human knowing—the fact of the answer planted inside the human brain—that Hans understood.

  For years, the horse had watched the human bodies in the courtyard clench and lean. From the inside out, they tightened as the magic number of taps approached, and they relaxed upon hearing it. Then a carrot for Hans, a hunk of bread, or a sugar lump, and—though it never seemed to matter much to him—a round of applause. Herr Von Osten’s meticulousness hadn’t taught Hans algebra or words; it taught him the secret languages of the bodies who anxiously watched over him. Here is what Hans actually learned: hoof-tapping brought reward only if he could read the minute tensions a human body holds while it awaits satisfaction.

  In his trials, Pfungst found he could rig himself to cue Hans for the wrong answers. He’d ask the horse what is twelve times three? and then concentrate on the number twenty-eight with all his might. He’d focus on Hans’s tapping hooves with that wrong number center stage in his mind—fooling himself, letting himself hope and then trust the horse was traveling toward the incorrect answer inside him.

  But when a man puts a burning number twenty-eight in his brain and bears down on it with all his heart—until a horse can read it in his fists, breath, face, and feet—how could that number possibly be incorrect?

  BAMBOO HARVESTER

  The animal from the first pilot episode was a tawny quarter horse with a hard mouth and little interest in new tricks. After that pilot flopped, Filmways Studios replaced nearly everything for the reshoot: a goofier Wilbur, a blonder wife, a different last name, and a brand new horse. Palomino this time—like Trigger!—and not a rental, either.

  They searched four states to find him. Within two weeks of purchase, he’d been gelded and registered in his new name. It was less of a mouthful than “Bamboo Harvester” and much more Horse Next Door—perfect for prime time, 1961. He cost the studio fifteen hundred dollars. You bet your ass they checked his teeth first.

  The equine mouth is full of facts; that’s why you don’t look a gift horse there. You might as well treat it like a price tag, because age, care, diet, temperament—they all come straight from the horse’s mouth. The grooves of the molars show what he has chewed: oats or grain or sandy weeds pulled from hard groundcover. A dark streak at the gum line would confess he was past his prime, and a run of “cups” on the tooth-ridges would report his prematurity. Well-filed molars meant he’d been handled with care.

  Beyond that, the horse’s mouth tells a ten-million-year story of triumph. Epochs built that mouth, as the planet morphed from Eocene to Oligocene to Miocene and took horses with it. When the earth cooled and jungles gave way to steppes, the horse mouth stretched to accommodate snippy, foraging incisors at the front and a factory of molars in the back. This pushed the eye up toward the ears and yielded that famous long face. Those back teeth let digestion begin in the mouth, a key to quick energy and amped-up thought, and they allowed the frontal lobe to swell, upping facial sensitivity. One of the great marvels of mammalian biology, soon to be seen grinning on the cover of TV Guide.

  Mister Ed picks up the telephone to call Clint Eastwood. Mister Ed wields a paddle to whup Wilbur at Ping-Pong. Mister Ed reels in a fish, types his memoirs, bowls a perfect game, swipes Wilbur’s wallet, emancipates a cockatiel, kisses his reflection, and sings the hit song, “Pretty Little Filly with the Ponytail”—all with his fabulous mouth. And of course, Mister Ed talks.

  His fourth line in the reshot pilot is “How now, brown cow”—wordplay meant to strike some barnyard resonance—but no bovine could handle that tongue twister, because a cow’s mouth can’t rise to any challenges. Where cows use lips mostly as protective cases for teeth, horse lips are much more ambitious. Six long muscles pull in multiple directions. The upper lip is prehensile and almost frighteningly sensitive, designed not only to grab food, but to sort it. As their mouths became nimbler, horses d
eveloped culture around their lips, which became velvety social instruments for nipping and nuzzling and holding emotional tension. So much of horse culture depends on these genius mouths.

  That old yarn about Ed’s trainer smearing peanut butter on the horse’s gums is a half-truth at best, and the rumor that they stuck an electric prod up his ass? Also bull. Most signs point to the use of a clear nylon line strung under Mister Ed’s lip that, when given a signal, he’d work to remove. At another signal (a crop tapped on a rear pastern, perhaps), he’d shut his mouth. Or at least that’s how it went for the first few dozen episodes, until the horse—ever sensitive to the commands of his crowd—evolved.

  There’s a visible difference in Mister Ed’s talking between the first two seasons. Early on, it’s much broader; he opens wide, reaches toward Wilbur with his tongue, and jaws his lines. As the episodes progress, however, Ed minimizes the movement, keeping his teeth closed and just wiggling his lips. The B-movie cowboy who provided Ed’s voice didn’t alter his drawl one bit, though.

  This smaller talking could happen without strings, as the horse could now respond to the touch-signal alone. And by the end of the show’s five-year run, he didn’t even need the crop. He’d figured out they wanted him to lip-wiggle whenever he was alone with Wilbur, after Wilbur stopped speaking.

  In 1994, Alan Young, the actor who played Wilbur, published his life story, which was at least fifty percent Ed stories. “Despite my early doubts,” Young writes, “working with a horse turned out to be the joy of my life.” He remembers taking horseback rides around the lots with the trainer who kept Ed. As Young chatted in the saddle, the trainer noticed Ed plodding along below him. Free and away from any cameras, the horse would still move his lips whenever the man on his back fell silent.

  EASTERN EXPRESS

  No backbone on earth is more rideable than the spine that gallops beneath you. It outnumbers yours by six thoracic vertebrae, all of which have ossified into a firm and sturdy line with a network of sinew supporting it. Behind you is where the gallop generates; this rear placement keeps the back more balanced than any ass or bull or camel. The legs beneath the hips and shoulders spent fifty million years growing long enough for this work. That’s what separates the spine you’re riding from the planet’s shorter quadrupeds, which must put their backs into running. And it’s also unlike you, with your lopsided limbs, soft feet, low endurance, and brittle neckbone.

  Add to this eighteen hundred years of saddles over that spine, seventeen centuries of stirrups, three millennia of bridles, and five thousand years of slowly showing a horse how you might sit on his back. Plus the years you’ve spent getting this particular body, this fused horse-and-rider, to gallop courses—like the one that stretches in front of you right now—in your spooky, thrilling tandem.

  For this course is not the perpendicular ride of trail pony and tourist. You’re no cowboy fighting with one arm against a hell-bent bronco. This ride is a language—each connecting point between you is a word. As he runs, your legs speak to his belly and backside, your hips and butt press to keep him supported; your hands help his neck rise and reach. The combinations of signals at varied intensities make these body-words into phrases, sentences even. And this six-minute run through changeable terrain is like two miles of free-written paragraphs, composed over mud and hedges and fences and ponds at twenty-one miles an hour.

  He’s never run this course before, never even walked it, as per the event’s rules. His trust in you is what sends him barreling toward a four-foot jump, reading your movements as fast as you can execute them. Moments before a jump, in the crucial last steps leading to the launch, you’ll discard him if you hinge forward into your jumping stance too early. Though crucial to give him momentum, that jump position is at his neck, and it’s like going off-line. It’s a blackout at Mission Control, a trapeze man tossing his partner before she sees the bar. Get into the pose too early, and the event’s judges will say you’ve “thrown the horse away.”

  A thrown-away horse might just stop moving, which rockets his lifted rider between his ears like a football through a goalpost. So keep your legs and hips and hands where he can feel them for as long as possible, sitz bones all but touching the saddle and calibrating with his every step. Lots of leg as he looks for the fences, a position that tells him, I’m still here; I know what’s coming. His ears prick forward when he finally sees the jump, but even then, careful still. Count your strides. Leg on. Stay with him, over his back.

  Because all around you, people are falling from horses: a third of the field eliminated after botching the width of a fence, or popping loose from the saddle on a slope. They call the course ditches “coffins” for the many horses they’ve spooked. When they end up separated, on either side of a tall fence, a horse and its human often call out to one another, using their voices to rejoin.

  But you knew your first day on a horse that you’d spend years hitting the ground. It’s a fact that never disappears, and what more can you expect when you jump on a thousand-pound flight animal and ask it to run with all its might? It’s an insane prospect, but the reward is equally nuts. A man cannot fly without proportionate risk—which you, of all people, should know.

  Of course you won’t know any of this at the time. You’ll remember nothing of the run at all. The last thing you’ll recall is chatting at the stables about the sweet, hungry horse you’ve been working up the levels, with his silly, inherited barn-name of “Bucket” that you’ve since shortened to “Buck.” A misnomer for such a gentle, eager guy that, unlike the feistier rides of your past, keeps you sturdy—as long as you don’t find a way to fuck things up.

  You won’t remember the starting box and the slight tension in his back from the dressage round, or cantering out of the box to your first little jump. You won’t remember the second obstacle, or your approach to the third—an easy “filler fence” just meant to establish rhythm—and you certainly won’t remember that awful choice to raise your body from his a half-stride too soon, disappearing from him, up into his neck.

  He has seven neck vertebrae, just like you do, named the same as yours, and you’ll roll forward over all of them, still holding onto the reins and taking the bridle with you. Past his axis vertebra, which rotates his head, just as yours does, and his atlas bone, which, like yours, supports the skull and holds the brainstem.

  In your own neck, these two bones will bear the full weight of your fall, all six-plus feet of you down seventeen hands of horse. The feet and hands of a fused body are now split back in two. Two spines: one chuffing on the other side of the little fence, the other sputtering “I can’t breathe” and fighting the medics like a cagey pony. With each twitch of your head, bone shards puncture your spinal cord.

  The crowd will come closer, saying your name, for they all know who you are; the cameras had come along (of course) because they heard you were in town, and you’ll just be on the ground there, not moving at all anymore, your neck at this odd angle. You who’d just looked so smooth for the cameras atop another huge, magnificent creature—another shiny star; you rode together so mightily, like a confident, superhuman thing; and now the horse is back in the barn—who knows what Buck can remember—and you’re blacked out and flying without him, up, up and away in a medevac copter named, of all goddamned things, Pegasus.

  OREO

  An overturned horse is a sickly lurch in the human gut. Something about that body twisted—robbed of the grace we demand from it—nauseates. All that flesh is, to us, a landscape in peril, which perhaps explains the countless fallen horses of art. See the contorted necks of Delacroix, the lolling tongues of Hogarth, the chariot-flattened bodies of the Alexander Mosaic.

  And we cannot forget the eyes of the screaming horse in the middle of Guernica. Just two dots in two wobbly circles, but still the exact, maddening idea of a horse crazed with fear. Picasso’s horse eyes, turned backward in the figure’s wrenched neck, are what set the whole painting spinning.

  At 4:20 p.m.,
a scaffold clanged to the pavement in front of his carriage, and Oreo just bolted. His driver still held the reins, so the horse dragged the buggy into Columbus Circle. When he hit a parked BMW, the back half of the carriage ripped off with a pair of Australian tourists still aboard. Several blocks north, the rest of it broke free, and the unhindered horse careened down Ninth Avenue, crossing Fifty-Ninth, Fifty-Eighth, and then, suddenly, halting. The bystanders who yelled after him said Oreo stopped at Fifty-Seventh Street when he saw the red traffic light.

  There is no larger mammal eye on dry land than that of Equus ferus caballus. Gigantic and roving, it magnifies objects much larger than human eyes do. From the sides of the head, a horse eye sees almost all the way behind its body. Even when the horse stoops to graze, the eyes scan the world for reasons to flee. While human eyes evolved into sharp, forward-facing, and predatory things, the horse eye grew to want the big picture—just enough to spot the shadow of risk and then take off running with its mighty body. The horse eye is hardwired for surprise, and the horse body spring-loaded to obey the eye’s command. Fear, as embodied in the eyeball, is what keeps a horse alive.

  By 4:35 two men had led Oreo to the sidewalk and tied him to a pole and a tree. He was still wearing his blinkers, so he had no sense of what was behind him or to his left and right. The blinkers were meant as a reassurance—to keep him calm and forward-focused while he worked. A horse’s vision is so broad and sensitive, even the carriage he pulls can startle him. But now the carriage was gone, as was his driver, and he was alone on the street with access to less than twenty-five percent of his natural vision.

  “He’s so stressed,” muttered a deep voice near a camera phone.

  By the time the mounted police managed to shoot him with a mild tranquilizer, a crowd had formed, fixated on the horse as he shook loose his livery, fought the dart, and bared his teeth. His eyes rolled in his head and he wouldn’t stop licking the air.