The Kokals spend a lot of time with their horses. The horses are ridden, but most of the time the Kokals spend with the animals is on the ground, and some of the most important interactions happen while they and the horses are just milling around. Often when they hang out with the horses there’s no particular goal in mind, no training that needs to happen. Throughout the day, someone will head out to the pastures and just stand there, not doing anything or insisting on any kind of goal-oriented behavior. The people and the horses are just there, in the pasture, together.
While we stood in the snow, Kris’s mother, Stephanie Kokal, talked to me, and as she talked, she began scratching the dock of a mustang’s tail. The horse responded by stretching his head out and nibbling contentedly at the withers of another horse. It’s this kind of chain-reaction bonding that keeps a band together, and the horses seemed quite happy to let humans join up this way.
Stephanie scratched under the jaw of one of the most skittish of the animals. He dropped his head, half closed his eyes, and looked like he was about to fall asleep. It’s not hard to imagine such an interaction happening thousands of years ago.
The Kokals never put the horses in stalls, although there are run-in sheds available in the winter months. At night, Stephanie says, the horses walk and walk, hardly ever standing still. Because of this, she believes that keeping horses in stalls affects their mental health.
Most of the Kokal horses are mustangs, but the family does keep two domestic horses. There are profound behavioral differences between the two groups. The domestic horses choose to shelter in the sheds when the weather is bad, but the range horses never do. They don’t care for enclosed spaces. Additionally, the domestic horses keep their distance from the mustangs. When Kris walks into a pasture, the mustangs usually approach him. The two domestic horses are a lot less curious. Kris never brings anything like apples or carrots or other treats to the horses, and it’s often someone else who brings the hay, so their interest in Kris is not based on food.
Their bond with Kris seems to be just that—a bond, like the bond formed between High Tail and Sam. Establishing yourself this way requires patience—not days and days, but months and months. Sometimes a considerable amount of time passes between when a horse first arrives at the farm and the time when Kris decides to ride the animal. Depending on the horse, riding may be one of his goals, but it’s not the only goal, and it’s never the primary goal.
The primary goal is getting to know the horse. “Watching wild horses is like sitting in church,” Kris once told me. Just a time for peaceful contemplation and for unraveling life’s mysteries. Once he’s done that—watched the horse and gained some understanding of the horse’s body language and temperament—then he may move on to the next step. “It’s a beautiful dance,” he said. “Once it starts … the horse really wants to be around us and everything can be done without forcing the horse.”
To those of us who grew up in the sterner schools of equitation, this might seem a little far-fetched, but as Kris and I moved from pasture to pasture, the range horses all eventually trailed along with us. They didn’t come over directly, following in a line. And they didn’t come quickly. They just seemed to gravitate in his direction. The domestic horses, on the other hand, ignored us.
As the stranger in the pasture, I got a lot of attention. A four-year-old, still new to the rules of etiquette, began examining my nylon coat. He was particularly infatuated with my coat’s hood, which was rimmed with faux fur. After smelling the coat and determining that what looked like a coyote’s pelt was actually nothing, he ran his supersensitive muzzle over my sleeve, playing with its feel. His lips touched the material so gently that they made a soft, musical noise as they swished back and forth. Whether he liked the sensation or not, I couldn’t tell. But he was certainly engrossed in the exploration process.
Kris bought his first horse as a teenager. The family had grown up in a big city and knew nothing about horses, but he had always been fascinated with them. When the family moved from Florida to New Hampshire, he was finally allowed to have one. But the first time he tried to ride his new horse, the Appaloosa reared and dumped him on the ground.
“Send the horse back,” he cried to his mother.
“I didn’t send you back when you were trouble,” Stephanie answered.
The horse stayed.
Left to his own devices, Kris had to figure things out by himself. Since his mother sent him out daily to his horse, and since he was reluctant to try to ride again, he just sat and watched. He wanted to know what the horse was about. He studied the horse’s behavior. He made lists of what the horse did. He made lists of when the horse did what he did. Then he tried to figure out why the horse did what he did. His dad is an airline pilot—the family is big on checklists.
Then he got a little bolder. Stephanie got a call from the town’s police chief, complaining that Kris and his brother, who had also bought a horse, were causing traffic problems. The boys still weren’t “riding” the horses in the traditional sense of the term, but they were pulling stunts like standing on the horses’ backs while the horses walked around in the field. People driving by were stopping their cars and getting out to watch.
If it isn’t one thing, Stephanie thought to herself, then it’s another.
* * *
In the twenty-first century, the Kokal family is unusual, but not unique. In fence-free Mongolia I saw horses who lived most of their lives in free-roaming bands that were tracked by humans, much as northern people used to track the reindeer herds, but not “herded” in the sense that sheep or cattle are herded.
When a traditional Mongolian rider wants to ride a particular horse, he drops a rope over the horse’s neck and removes the horse from the free-roaming band. He uses the horse for a few days, then puts the horse back in his band. The horses adapt easily to the two different lifestyles. When called into service and saddled and bridled, the horse stands faithfully beside a fallen rider or willingly jumps up onto an open-bed pickup truck. I’ve seen them riding patiently on flatbeds without any side panels over deeply rutted roads without being tied and without jumping off. Yet when the same horses are released and sent back to the band, they easily resume their other life.
This is a system that’s remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years (except for the pickup truck), and may well be how horses were kept at Botai fifty-five hundred years ago. The archaeologists David Anthony and Dorcas Brown, a husband-and-wife team, believe that people were riding and working with horses at least a thousand years earlier than the evidence at Botai suggests. They base their theory on evidence that around sixty-five hundred years ago, human history in the western steppe region and in eastern Europe underwent an abrupt change. People who had once lived in small, stable villages began to live in larger settlements and to develop power elites. Anthony and Brown attribute this change to the advent of riding and horse management. The change in lifestyle, they suggest, came about because mounted warriors became highly mobile, and the small villages were easily conquered by riders on horseback. As a result, a system of rule by elite males with horses replaced more peaceful and egalitarian endeavors, they propose.
Whether or not riding began as early as Anthony and Brown suggest, partnering up with horses certainly changed the lives of people who lived on the Eastern European and Asian steppes. In the centuries following Botai, horses began to be used to pull wagons that could be filled with a family’s entire possessions, making it possible for whole families to live the mobile-home lifestyle. A steppe family could winter in a village with other people, then head for mountains to find solitude and good pasture once the snow melted.
“The key that opened the grasslands was the horse,” Anthony writes in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. In the course of their summer travels, he believes, early horse cultures passed on information and ideas. Horses thus created a new connectivity—absolutely essenti
al if civilizations are to prosper.
* * *
In fact, there’s no real reason why riding* could not have been part of the Pleistocene lifestyle. The archaeologist and author Paul Bahn has suggested that it might have been possible. I spoke about this with Bahn, who quickly cautioned that this is sheer speculation, as there is no clear-cut archaeological evidence of such a relationship—no bits or headstalls, no evidence of blankets being used as saddles, not even any evidence, as at Botai, of horses being routinely kept in enclosures.
But it would have been no big deal for a Pleistocene person to climb aboard the back of one of the little Ice Age horses and ride like the wind until the horse tired. This would explain the proliferation of horse art during the Pleistocene, particularly when, toward the end of the ice ages, evidence shows that horses were no longer common and people were no longer commonly hunting and eating them. Since Pleistocene art almost never depicts humans, the argument that the art of that age does not show horseback riders isn’t meaningful.
The example of Kris Kokal shows us that even partnering up casually with a horse may not have been that difficult. All the first riders had to do was offer something to the horse that the horse wanted, maybe just companionship. Then, if you’re patient and consistent, the horse will start to come to you. That’s their nature. Neither is there any reason why horse domestication could not have occurred long before Botai. As I learned by watching the rapa das bestas, the initial stages of horse domestication could have been simple. We know that people who hunted horses were skilled at this, so it seems reasonable to assume a smooth transition from hunting horses by corralling them to managing the horses by releasing those deemed valuable as breeding stock. Unfortunately, in the days before saddles and metal bits, we are left, scientifically speaking, without hard evidence, with little more than daydreams.
Learning to ride horses was a major advance for human civilization, but there’s still the question of why horses held so much allure for us long ago, long before riding and domestication began. Why was the artist who carved the Vogelherd horse so inspired by horses, and why do we still feel that same attraction today? It is our own nature to want to form relationships with the animals around us, but what made the horse in particular so special? One answer might be that we have always been hypnotized by that phenomenon of evolution—the horse’s massive eye. Scientists have even realized that the eye and its neurological connections can help us understand the inner workings of the horse’s mind.
8
THE EYE OF THE HORSE
The Lion and the Horse were arguing as to which had the better vision. The Lion, on a dark night, could see a white pearl in milk—but the Horse could see a black pearl amidst coal. The judges decided in favor of the Horse.
—ARABIAN FABLE, quoted in G. L. Walls, The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation
One morning years ago, the Canadian vision researcher Brian Timney noticed the horses in his field staring intently at something in the distance. Timney had looked in that same direction earlier and had seen nothing, but he looked again. Seven miles away hot air balloons of many different colors drifted languidly in the gentle blue sky. To Timney, the balloons were far from alarming—a festive sight on a summer day.
To the horses, though, the balloons were cause for concern—not because they were balloons, but because in the minds of the horses they were something else entirely, something horses had evolved over tens of millions of years to pay close attention to. The balloons were that nightmare of nightmares for horses: unusual moving objects. They were barely visible, but when Timney watched his horses watching the balloons, he saw that the horses had the kind of look all horses have when they are deciding whether to take another bite of grass or to make a run for safer pastures. After tens of millions of years of life on the open steppes, evolution has provided the horse with a very focused point of view: Better safe than sorry.
Timney has devoted most of his career to studying vision in humans, but the behavior of his horses intrigued him. Just exactly how well did the horses see the balloons? How did what they saw compare to what he saw? How far could a horse see? And what did they perceive when they looked? He saw the different colors of the balloons against the sky. What colors did they see?
I once performed my own informal equine visual experiments, also inspired by noticing unexpected behavior in horses. Unlike Timney, I wasn’t interested in the detection of distant objects, but was instead curious about what horses can see right under their noses. Once, trying to get a horse to do some stretching in his box stall, I handed him chunks of bright orange carrots off to his sides, so he had to stretch his neck toward his rump, then down toward his feet and even between his feet.
When the carrot was in my hand, he did fine: this was a horse who was particularly fond of carrots. But when I accidentally dropped one of the bright orange chunks, he couldn’t find it. Eventually I realized that the horse couldn’t see the carrot lying there. To me, the carrot was obvious: an orange-red object lying atop straw bedding. It stood out like a sore thumb. Not to the horse. Although he seemed to be looking directly at the carrot, he didn’t pick it up. Like most horse owners, I’d always figured that the horse’s vision was pretty much like my vision, give or take a few small details. But this was weird. In the world I saw in that box stall, there was a carrot lying on the ground. In the world the horse saw, there was no carrot.
Just to be sure that I wasn’t wrong about the carrot problem, I tried the same experiment outside. Maybe the stall was too dark. Again, I dropped the carrot on the ground under the horse’s nose. Again, he couldn’t see it. I directed his head down to an angle where, it seemed to me, he should be able to see it easily. No results. I pointed to the carrot with my finger. Again no results.
And just to be sure that he hadn’t suddenly developed a lack of interest in carrots, I picked it up and offered it to him. A carrot in the hand was something he’d learned to expect. It was gone in an instant.
For thousands of years, horses and humans—two species with unique visual systems—have been partnering up to help each other see the world around them. We do this intuitively, and our ability to perceive what the horse perceives depends very much on plain old saddle time. The more you ride, the more you anticipate your horse’s vision. If you don’t learn this art, you’ll spend a lot of time in the dirt. The horse does the same thing in reverse: a seasoned horse has learned that his rider will see certain kinds of things for him.
If well partnered, horse and rider are really two fundamental components of one living organism. This is the essence of the joy of riding. We often feel and respond to the horse’s vision. For example, when a horse gets nervous because of some danger he thinks he sees around him, we settle him with our hands to let him know we see nothing there. If the partnership rests on solid ground, he will take our word for it. On the other hand, when we’re out on the trail, we rely on our horses to see tiny details that we ourselves might miss. Consider the old Westerns: cowboys sitting around a campfire are alerted when their horses look toward the rustlers on a distant ridge.
Of course, we don’t always know what sight will spook a horse. One sunny afternoon in Swaziland, for example, I rode through parkland with a genial local guide who willingly indulged me in riding up to a variety of wildlife. When I approached a hippo in a small pool of water, the hippo ignored me and my horse. The nearby crocodile did not. Assuming that my horse would not care for the croc, I firmed up my hands on the reins, waiting for a bolt. The horse, a Swaziland native, must have been used to this sort of behavior from foreigners, because he ignored my hands and continued to walk along, half-snoozing. Most likely the horse had seen the croc crawling through the tall grass long before I did. He just didn’t perceive any cause for alarm.
Because of evolution, horses’ eyes are highly attuned to notice even the smallest of movements in their sweeping field of vision. This is why my Swaziland horse probably knew long before I did about that croc r
ustling through the grass. On the other hand, scientists theorize that the horse discriminates only about ten thousand or so colors, while we discriminate millions. Moreover, the colors available to us are by no means all the colors that exist. There are tens of millions more hues, but we simply cannot detect them. Pigeons run rings around us in that regard, proving that there’s much more to the world than our eyes can pick up.
Humans, horses, and all mammals enjoy the same basic visual biology—another result of our shared evolution. We have camera eyes, complete with cornea, lens, retina, and optic nerve. But because horses and humans have traveled separate evolutionary pathways for at least 56 million years, the horse eye and the human eye have also evolved some important differences. Take color, for example. Horses, like most placental mammals, have only two color-responsive cones in their eyes. This was once true for us as well, until 35 to 30 million years ago, when our own primate ancestors, still committed to life in the treetops, evolved a third color cone that allowed us to see with greater clarity, precision, and speed. (Color is perceived in the human brain just a bit more quickly than line or shape.) We’re not as alert to dangers in the distance (if you live life in the trees, you usually can’t see beyond the forest), but with three color-responsive cones and 20/20 vision, we can detect distant objects rather well. Horses, with 20/30 vision, can also detect objects in the distance, but not with our clarity.
Despite their differences, though, horse and human eyes share an important quality: they communicate emotions. For example, a horse eye that’s showing the sclera, the white of the eye, or a human eye that’s showing more of the sclera than usual, is communicating fear. We, too, read eyes in order to understand emotions. Charles Darwin considered this an innate skill that crossed cultural and even species boundaries.
Decades ago, the research psychologist Paul Ekman decided to create an experiment that would show whether Darwin was correct or not. Ekman traveled the globe taking photographs of people from remote cultures that had had little, if any, contact with the world at large—something that would be rare indeed in the twenty-first century—and found they could easily read the emotions of people they’d never encountered.
The Horse Page 21