What had brought on this chaos? Ransom wasn’t sure. Adult horses rarely exert themselves in summertime heat unless they have to, but this time thundering hoofs had raged across the whole meadow. As we watched the horses, we noticed that the mares paid little overt attention to the male shenanigans. In fact, in my time watching wild horses, I have never seen mares react to the hostile antics of stallions—as long as the boys kept their problems to themselves.
“That’s usually the case,” Ransom said when I asked about this. There are some times, he said, when mares will add their opinions to a dispute between stallions, but those times are very, very rare.
In my childhood books I often read about mares huddling together and breathlessly waiting to see the outcome of the stallions’ battles, but this is not at all what happens. Mares usually ignore the males’ conflicts. This makes sense. After all, if mares stopped eating every time two stallions had a stare-down, the mares would starve to death.
* * *
For his doctoral dissertation, Ransom, with the help of several assistants, including the local horse expert Phyllis Preator, recorded the behavior of individual horses living in three different regions in Wyoming and Colorado. That research generated a lot of data that, together with work done earlier on the same horses by other scientists, has created a rich long-term record of the intimate social lives of individual wild horses, one of the few such records anywhere in the world. The data is so thorough that Ransom can sometimes find the birth dates of horses who were, by the time he began his work, already entering old age. He knew where some of these horses had spent most of their lives, knew when some had moved from one area to another, knew when they joined up with specific horses and how long they stayed with their companions before moving on.
Recent ethological research has finally begun to reveal the depth of horses’ emotions, but the idea, scientifically speaking, that horses have emotions is nothing new. Charles Darwin wrote about horses (and many other animals) in his 1872 masterwork The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which proposed that human emotional expressions are innate and universal, and are shared by a variety of animals. Considered a founding text for the science of ethology, Darwin’s book explained that certain basic emotions—anger and fear and disgust, for example—evolved as survival mechanisms early in the history of life. For example, in The Expression of the Emotions, Darwin compared his own startle response at the approach of a large snake to the startle response of a frightened horse. Shared emotions, Darwin declared, help us understand the emotions of other species. “Everyone recognizes the vicious appearance which the drawing back of the ears gives to a horse,” he wrote. That was certainly true in the Pryor Mountains that day, when Ransom and I watched the snaking stallion with his flattened ears. Neither of us was about to get in the marauder’s way.
For Darwin, basic emotions were a universal language, a kind of innate lingua franca common to “man and the lower animals,” as he put it. They are survival strategies that, Darwin believed, could be studied methodically across species. Darwin’s groundbreaking book set the study of animal behavior and emotions on a solid foundation. It said, scientifically: We are all in this together.
The Expression of the Emotions and Darwin’s subsequent writings spawned all sorts of scientific studies of animal behavior, but horses for the most part were left out of this paradigm shift, despite Darwin’s discussion of horse behavior in The Expression. Perhaps this was just a case of familiarity breeding contempt: we assumed we already knew all we needed to know about horses because domesticated horses were part of our everyday lives.
Now that ethological research principles have begun to be applied to the study of wild horses, we have learned how little we know. Thankfully, researchers are upending many deeply embedded myths. For example, a recent National Academy of Sciences report declared that “a harem, also known as a band, consists of a dominant stallion, subordinate adult males and females, and offspring.” Most of us have been taught this and at first glance, it would seem to be true. What we notice when watching wild horses is the uproar created by the stallions.
But research by Ransom and others has shown that this male-centric view is wrong. Far from subordinate, mares frequently initiate the band’s activities. The stallions are quite often little more than hangers-on. Ransom was once watching a band of mares who stopped grazing and began heading for water. The stallion didn’t notice. When he looked up and saw his female companions leaving, he panicked.
“He started running after them,” Ransom told me. “He was like a little boy calling out ‘Hey, where’s everybody going?’”
The mares ignored him. Whether the stallion caught up or not didn’t appear to concern them. Mares also sometimes have stallion preferences. They resist males they don’t like with surprising persistence, even when that male has established himself as the band’s stallion. The ecologist Joel Berger studied the behavior of two unrelated mares who had spent several years together. The pair joined a band which was then taken over by a new stallion, who tried to assert himself. The two mares refused to accept his attentions. For three days “during numerous forced copulation attempts toward both by this stallion, the females reciprocally aided each other (thirteen times and eighteen times respectively) by kicking and biting the stallion as he persistently and aggressively” tried to mate, Berger wrote in Wild Horses of the Great Basin. It’s long been known that female elephants cooperate, but before ethologists began systematically studying free-roaming horses, few people suspected that cooperating mares were capable not only of waging such a fight—but of winning it. Given the truth about mares, “harem” seems like such an old-fashioned word.
The biologist John Turner found much the same thing when he studied horses living in high chaparral country on the California-Nevada border. Turner’s ongoing research, which has lasted at this writing for almost thirty years, has revealed many occasions when mares were not subordinate to stallions, particularly when one band stallion was driven away by a new stallion. The behavior of these mares was often subtle and indirect, he told me, so that unless observers pay close attention over many years, they might miss the fact that the mares do often get their own way.
“Sometimes a mare resisting the change behaves in such a way that the new stallion just lets the old stallion come and take her away,” he told me. For the new stallion, coveting these resistant mares may just not be worth the trouble. “It’s easy to anthropomorphize some of this,” he said, “but sometimes, that’s the way it is. Horses do a lot of the same things that we do.”
* * *
At the conference in Vienna where I met Ransom I also met the Spanish equine ethologist Laura Lagos, who, with the wildlife biologist Felipe Bárcena, studies the behavior of an unusual type of free-roaming horse called a Garrano. Lagos invited me to come visit her study site in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. In this rugged region, shared by horses and wolves and humans for millennia, Lagos and Bárcena have notated the behavior of these free-roaming horses for years, just as Ransom and his team have done in Wyoming and Colorado. The scientists have come to admire the horses’ tough, stubborn natures.
Garranos, possibly descended from the horses painted by the Ice Age artists, live rough, tough lives. In the American West, free-roaming horses have few predators, but Garranos must defend themselves from relentless wolf packs. They must be able to thrive in a challenging North Atlantic climate and must live on a dreadful diet of gorse. Sometimes called the Plant from Hell, gorse has sharp thorns in lieu of leaves and can grow waist high. Walking through it without long pants is akin to medieval bloodletting, yet Garranos love this stuff. Many have thick handlebar mustaches that may have evolved to protect their sensitive lips from nasty gashes.
In the course of their study, Lagos and Bárcena cataloged the behavior of a pair of mares in one band who were strongly bonded with each other and who often stood just a bit apart from the rest of the band. At breeding time, the mares went together t
o visit the stallion of another band. Lagos watched one of the mares consort with this stallion rather than with the stallion from her own band. Then the mares returned to their original group. When the second mare was ready to breed, the duo again deserted their original band and its stallion to consort with the other stallion. Then, again, they returned to their original group. This was not an anomaly. She saw the same pair do the same thing the following year. “They prefer their own territory, but the stallion of the other band,” she told me.
The researchers Katherine Houpt and Ronald Keiper, who followed the behavior of several horse bands including the horses of the North American Atlantic coast’s Assateague Island, have also found that “the stallions were neither the dominant nor the most aggressive animals … and were subordinate to some mares.”
I suspect that the myth of stallion dominance has persisted for so long because stallion behavior makes for some pretty enthralling theater. The stallions puff themselves up and snort and squeal, and then, if the battle proceeds, rear up and clash in a frenzy of bellicosity. By contrast, mares going about their business of grazing and raising foals lack the pizzazz factor.
The prevalence of our belief that stallions dominate a band may be due to the hierarchical structure of our own culture, suggests the British researcher Deborah Goodwin. She believes that our own emphasis on dominance has caused us to view relationships among horses with blinders on.
The “blinder factor” may be why we often fail to grasp the flexibility of natural horse behavior. Traditionally, instead of thinking about the relationship between a horse and a human as a partnership, we have thought of it in anthropocentric terms: we dominate and horses submit, according to what we assume is the natural order of things. End of story. Since we don’t look closely enough, we misunderstand. We miss the fact that the social lives of mares may be rather complicated. One mare may dominate a second mare, and the second mare may dominate a third mare—but the third mare may dominate the first mare.
Moreover, it turns out that mares don’t need to have huge fights to get what they want. Instead, they use the technique of patience.
For example, Ransom believes that only about half the foals in the bands he studied are sired by the band’s closely associated stallion. This finding flies in the face of conventional thinking, which claims that stallions often kill foals who are not their own.*
I was surprised.
“What,” I asked him, “are the mares getting up to when no one is looking?”
He answered with the backstory of High Tail, a seemingly nondescript little mare, a plain Jane with sagging back and poor coat, a mare we were watching at the foot of the Pryors, on the Wyoming side of the mountains. She was dubbed High Tail because the dock of her tail sat a bit too high on her croup. An aging dun with a thick, solid black stripe running down her back, High Tail had zebra-like black bars on her withers and zebra-like striping on the backs of her lower forelegs. Apart from these distinctive markings, High Tail looked like any mare standing in a farm field. If you didn’t know her life story, you could easily mistake her for a child’s riding pony or a retired plow horse. With her glory days clearly over, you probably wouldn’t give her a second glance.
Yet Ransom’s data showed that this mare had had a rich and varied life that involved a number of long-term male associates. She had been deeply bonded to at least one of them, her youthful first attachment. High Tail was by no means as physically powerful as stallions like Duke or Tecumseh—but what she did have was an abundance of persistence. She called her own shots.
Free-roaming horses tend to have minds of their own. Says Phyllis Preator, “They think different. That’s all I can say. They just think different.” If mustangs in general “think different” from domesticated horses, then High Tail tended to “think different” even from other mustangs.
Many of the Pryor Mountain horses choose to spend their summers in the flower-filled lush meadows thousands of feet above where we stood watching High Tail. Those high summer meadows, filled with aromatic lupines and sweet buttercups and other delicious treats, are like the proverbial land of milk and honey for horses who must weather unpredictable and harsh Wyoming winters.
Nevertheless, High Tail never went up there. She was born in 1989 down in more desertlike regions and that’s where she chose to stay. That’s one of the major differences between horse bands and grazing herd animals. Horses prefer a familiar home territory. They circle around from spot to spot, enjoying windy ridgelines in the summer and protective valleys in the winter, but they rarely migrate long distances.
Ransom first caught up with High Tail in 2003. He found the mare passing her days in the company of Sam, a stallion born in 1991. They made up a pair who, Ransom thought, probably encountered each other during the wanderings of their youth. An old myth claims that a stallion acquires mares, but if you watch closely enough, you’ll see that mares sometimes work hard to get a stallion’s attention. They can be every bit as assertive as stallions.
However the alliance between High Tail and Sam began, it worked. They stayed together for years. Eventually, other mares joined them and Sam found himself attached to a small mare-and-offspring group. Research shows that roughly half the time mares and stallions bond in this peaceful fashion. There’s no need for a stallion to “conquer” the mare; she’s often a more-than-willing partner.
Shortly after Ransom began following High Tail and Sam’s band, he noticed a second, younger stallion hanging around a short distance away. Sam did not welcome this new stallion, dubbed Sitting Bull. The more Sitting Bull tried to become part of the group, the more Sam fought him off. Sam spent a good deal of energy trying to drive away the younger stallion, but to no avail.
Whenever Ransom saw High Tail’s band during this period, Sitting Bull was usually there, hanging around on the outskirts, stalking the mares and dogging Sam, waiting for his chance. A stallion like this, called a satellite stallion, adopts a mating strategy of patience. He’s always there, just on the outskirts, hoping to catch the eye of one of the mares: “To be a stalker pretty much sums up the idea,” Ransom said. There are stories in the scientific literature of satellite stallions learning how to cooperate with the lead stallion and thus gradually gaining the ability, on a limited basis, to mate with some mares, but this was not the case with Sam and Sitting Bull. The two fought continuously. Still, Sitting Bull stayed near, biding his time.
His chance came in 2004. Horses who live at the base of the Pryor Mountains constantly face the challenge of finding freshwater. High Tail’s band often descended the steep walls of the Big Horn Canyon Gorge, where they could drink their fill of river water. One day, they went down as a group. Records show that Sam did not allow Sitting Bull to come along. While the young stallion waited above, the rest of the horses stood on a small ledge and drank. Off in the distance heavy rains broke out. A flash flood inundated the gorge, cutting off the animals’ escape route. For about two weeks, High Tail and her band, along with Sam, remained trapped without food. Conditions were so stressful that one mare died giving birth.
Realizing that the situation was dire, people intervened and helped them escape. The severely emaciated animals managed to climb up out of the gorge. Sam in particular had lost his muscular sleekness. Almost dead from starvation, he was easy pickings for the satellite stallion, who had hung around above the gorge. When the horses came up, Sitting Bull “just swooped right in and drove Sam off,” Ransom said. Sam tried repeatedly to drive off his younger competitor, but he was no longer strong enough.
Most of the band accepted the young stallion. Not High Tail. The old dun mare chose Sam, the stallion with whom she had spent a good deal of her life. For High Tail, the bond with Sam was even stronger than the bond she had with the other mares in her group. At every opportunity she left her own band and headed off in search of her longtime mate. Each time she left, the young stallion chased her back, snaking his head and baring his teeth, threatening her with injury.
High Tail stayed with Sam until he died in 2010. (Because of the stress of constant fighting with other males, stallions often live much shorter lives than mares.) Following Sam’s death, researchers saw High Tail with a stallion they called Admiral. Eventually Admiral, too, fell from grace.
When we saw her that July afternoon, old High Tail was with only two other horses. One was a mare from her original band, an animal she’d known for years. The other was, ironically, that old usurper Sitting Bull. Rejected by High Tail in her younger years, he was now one of her boon companions. Primate field researchers long ago discovered the ebb and flow of alliances within primate troops, and finally we know that horses in the wild behave this way, too.
I asked Ransom if he thought there were any hard-and-fast rules about horse behavior in the wild.
“They rarely choose to be alone,” he said. “That’s one given.”
Other than that, he couldn’t think of much. Like humans, horses are blessed with an exceptional cognitive flexibility that allows them to adapt to a phenomenal variety of situations.
Traditionally, we’ve thought that horses only function via a kind of computerlike binary code of positive and negative reinforcement—the carrot or the stick. Now that science is showing us the subtleties of how horses naturally interact with each other, we can expand our own interactions with them, improve our ability to communicate with them, and enrich our partnership. This is exciting news, not just for horses, but for us, too. A relationship that has been traditionally seen as unidirectional—we command and they obey—can now become much more nuanced and sensitive.
The Horse Page 3