The Horse

by Wendy Williams

  Harman discovered that horses have a blind spot directly in front of their faces. Because of their evolutionary heritage, horses see well down the length of their noses, so that they can see which plants they are eating in a field, and they can see almost (but not quite) directly behind them, so they can always keep an eye out for predators slowly creeping through tall grasses. But they cannot see in front of their faces the way we can. If you’re brushing in between a horse’s eyes, for example, he can’t see the brush and may only catch brief glimpses of your moving hand. He has to learn to trust you and your brush.

  Harman also showed that the world the horse sees is wide and flat and narrow. Most of the horse’s color cones and many of the rods are located in a thin visual strip that runs all along the retina. There are only a few rods and cones located outside of this visual strip, while the strip itself is so thickly populated with rods and cones that the horse pays attention to the world in a strip-like fashion.

  By contrast, our own vision is circular. When we take a jump, we see that jump in the center of our visual circle. When our horse takes the same jump, it’s just one of many objects he perceives. He is paying attention to movement across the whole of that visual strip and responding to anything that, in his experience, shouldn’t be there. He’s particularly sensitive to movements picked up on the edges of that visual strip. We don’t see well out of the corners of our eyes, and neither do horses—but they are wired to respond immediately to any movement picked up that way, regardless of what it might be. This is one reason why carriage horses wear blinkers—the flashing of the turning spokes, picked up in the corners of the horse’s eye, signals something dangerous following him, but he cannot perceive what that danger might be.

  A panoramic view of nearly 360 degrees means the horse is taking in an awful lot of data. How does he handle what might seem to us like visual overload? Most likely, he does not treat all the data the same, but instead picks out various pieces of information—particularly novelty—to which he responds. Given enough time, horses can learn to tune out unimportant visual information.

  We do the same thing. When we drive a car, for example, we don’t see much of the world we’re passing through, but we do see what’s important, like a car ahead of us veering erratically. We even do this aurally in a busy restaurant. When we’re trying to listen to a conversation amid the clatter of knives and forks and the chatter at other tables, we ignore most sounds and only perceive the desired words.

  Similarly, the horse may well filter out most of his visual world and “see” only what matters most to him. Just as we don’t pay attention to much of what’s out there when we drive but do notice a car careening toward us because that’s important to us, the horse is predisposed to notice unexpected movements that, because of his evolutionary heritage, may be important to him—the rustling of grass behind him, for example, or a small movement up on a distant ridgetop.

  * * *

  When I was a child learning to ride, no one ever talked to me about how horses perceive the world. It was Whisper and Gray who taught me the importance of taking into account our visual differences. One cool October morning, when crisp Canadian air had arrived overnight to turn the maple, oak, and birch trees along my dirt road into a thousand shades of glory, it seemed a fine time for a ride. I tacked up Whisper and put a Western saddle on Gray. A friend who didn’t ride wanted to come along. My old half Percheron, always staunchly opposed to any kind of physical exertion, seemed an excellent mount for her.

  About five minutes down the road, we saw something brand-new in my tiny town: a high-stepping pony pulling a smart two-wheeled buggy. The spokes of the buggy’s turning wheels sparkled brightly in the sunlight speckling its way through the dark, cathedral-like forest canopy.

  I took note. I knew nothing about horse vision, but I did know that horses do not like novelty. But both Whisper and Gray seemed nonchalant. The buggy came closer. The pony trotted toward us. The horses paid no attention. Copacetic.

  Then, when the cart was about forty feet away, Gray bolted. Like a Thoroughbred busting out of the starting gate, he tore along in high gear with his neck stretched out. It was useless to tell my friend to pull back on the reins. Even if she’d dared to let go of the saddle horn, her efforts would have been futile. Gray was a horse on a mission, and his mission was to get away from the monster that had, without warning, loomed up in his field of vision.

  Whisper, of course, saved the day. He caught up with Gray, got in front of him, slowed to a jog and then to a walk. Gray calmed down. My friend did not. As far as I know, she’s never ridden again.

  It was a good life lesson for me. Horses do not see what I see. But I always wondered: What did Gray perceive that fall afternoon? When did he notice the cart and pony, and what in the world did he think he saw? What could possibly have been so terrifying?

  Science has now provided me with a few answers to the questions I had back when Gray bolted. I know that when Gray and I looked up into the fall sky, we both probably saw the color blue, although the blue that Gray saw may have been less stunning than the rich, deep blue I enjoyed. When we both looked at the autumn leaves, the beautiful hues that I saw were probably only barely perceived by the horse.

  And even though the sun was shining, the tall trees on each side of the road made much of the road ahead quite dark, so that the horses might have had trouble seeing into the distance. When the buggy appeared, I knew what it was: my brain put together a picture of a smartly outfitted pony pulling a buggy. Gray may have perceived something quite different. As the buggy got closer, I saw more and more details, like the turning spokes and the pony’s high head carriage. Gray probably did not see many of those details at first. And when the pony finally became clearly visible to him, his eyes may well have been alerted by the flashes of sunlight playing on the turning wheel spokes. These flashes may well have been even more difficult for him to cope with because of the speckled light coming through the treetop foliage. Did he finally put together a mental image of a pony being chased by a predator with bright, flashing eyes?

  We can think about this, but we may never know for sure. Although science has in recent years found out a lot about how the eyes of the horse function, we don’t know much about how that information is perceived in the horse’s brain. How do horses assemble mental images of the world in which they live? We know something about how cats do this, because cats are small and make good research subjects. And we know something about how dogs do this, because we care about dogs and are willing to invest research money in studying their behavior. But horses are inconveniently large research subjects, and, although we care about them, we have been remiss about improving our scientific understanding of how their minds work.

  In fact, although we’ve studied thinking, or cognition, extensively in a variety of animals ranging from whales and dolphins to cats and dogs, we are only beginning to scientifically explore how a horse thinks and how this might be connected to why he has been so willing to partner with humans.

  9

  THE DANCE OF COMMUNICATION

  Under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds. We see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and jumping for joy; in the bounding and barking of a dog when going out to walk with his master; and in the frisking of a horse when turned out into an open field. Joy quickens the circulation.

  —CHARLES DARWIN, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

  In a paddock about an hour inland from the muddle of Los Angeles, an old ex-racehorse and his owner were dancing up a storm. Their elegant ballet was as evocative as any Pleistocene painting, as vital as the Vogelherd horse.

  Karen Murdock raised her arms in an exquisite expression of exultation. Lukas reared gracefully, holding up his side of the interchange. In response, Karen waggled her finger. Lukas backed up. She signaled him to lope, she signaled him
to jog, she signaled him to come hither and then again to go away.

  The exchange went both ways. Sometimes Lukas, a tall chestnut, initiated an action and Karen responded. Lukas turned out to be an expert at getting Karen to smile, and by now he knew that her smile was likely to be followed by some other kind of engaging behavior. They were an old couple, and they knew each other very well.

  Karen and Lukas (Joan Malloch, courtesy of Karen Murdock)

  In the midst of their exchange, Karen turned away from the horse and spoke to me about the two-way nature of their partnership. “These are not ‘tricks.’ Our whole lives go into this interaction. It’s an entire process.” She meant that she does not command and wait for Lukas to obey, but that the pair share equally in their interactions.

  She meant “whole lives” almost literally: every day Karen leaves the suburban Southern California home she shares with her husband and heads for the barn, where she spends hours with Lukas, trying to learn as much as she can, in an informal fashion, about what makes horses do the things they do. It’s a fascination she’s had since childhood but can only indulge now that she’s retired.

  As Karen continued to talk to me, Lukas became impatient. He started using small, subtle movements to get Karen’s attention. When those didn’t work, he bowed his head between his knees. That was usually the clincher, but this time Karen ignored him. His restlessness accelerated. Ever more impatient with the small talk, he went on with the show, but nothing he did diverted Karen’s attention.

  Horses, like dogs, learn quickly that when they get a human to laugh, it’s all over for the human. But this time, no dice. Lukas began to take more extreme steps. He tried the hokey pokey: one leg lifted forward, like a fancy dressage horse; then, the other. After that, the river of his imagination flowed forth and he offered all kinds of inventive body language. He stood with arched neck. He bent his head first in one direction, then in another. He tried walking away. No cigar.

  Finally he walked over to Karen. Ever so gently he closed his front teeth over a tiny bit of her jacket and quietly but firmly led her off: enough is enough. We laughed, even though we knew we shouldn’t have. Our laughter was partly due to the irony of a horse leading away his owner, but also because, like a toddler, Lukas had managed to end a conversation in which he had not been included.

  Lukas’s body language reminded me a great deal of the kinds of things I’d seen with Jason Ransom while watching the McCullough Peaks and Pryor Mountain horses in Wyoming, and of the patiently built partnership between Kris Kokal and his mustangs. Horses talk to each other a lot—“continuously,” according to Ransom. Apparently, they never shut up. They talk to people, too, through body language, but it’s rare to see humans respond in the way Karen does. This was a two-way street. The conversation went back and forth, like two old friends sharing cups of coffee.

  To watch Karen and Lukas was enlightening. I’ve spent much of my life with horses, but never known that this deep level of exchange was possible. Karen finished what she’d been saying, that Lukas was not a “trick” horse, and that she was not a “trainer,” but just someone who cared about Lukas: “I work with Lukas because I’m interested in bonding, because bonding has to come first.”

  Then she walked off with the horse, who had regained his position as the center of her attention. When they were finished waltzing and liberty time was over, we all walked back to Lukas’s open-air stall. With Lukas inside and Karen outside, with just a rope between them, Karen opened a small folding table on which she put several large bright plastic numbers—6, 2, 5, 3—the kind you use to teach simple numbers to very young children.

  When Karen called out a number, Lukas identified that number by touching the correct figure with his unshaven muzzle. When he answered correctly, which was most of the time, Karen gave him a carrot sliver. Karen and her husband spend well over an hour every evening slicing up the next day’s supply. Karen likes to think up new activities that she and Lukas can do together, but she’s not a scientist and is not doing formal research. Instead, she just wants to interact with her horse informally, to see what happens when force is not used.

  Carrots may be the currency by which they live, but the bond between them goes much deeper. There is a great deal of debate in the horse world over whether it’s “right” to reward a horse for doing something or whether the horse should perform the action because someone ordered him to, but it was apparent watching Karen and Lukas that their interaction was based on freedom rather than domination and that it had little to do with snacking. It was all about cooperation. The carrots were just the icing on the cake.

  Folk wisdom says that a horse’s attention span is quite short, but I watched Lukas spend several hours deeply engaged with Karen without getting restless. In fact, when Karen walked away for a few minutes, the horse looked steadfastly in her direction until she returned. Is this “friendship”? Is this what love is made of? Who knows?

  There does seem to be a neurological basis for their connection. The neurobiologist Hans Hofmann has found that vertebrates as a group share a basic brain circuitry associated with bonding and reward processing. Certainly, what I saw was a very strong social bond, one that had blossomed over the years into a veritable marriage of personalities. Karen and Lukas enjoy the same activities, the same pastimes, the same games. You can almost imagine them at the same breakfast table reading the newspaper together. Karen has also written a book, Playing with Lukas, that describes their relationship. One of my favorite sentences: “Lukas and I are in the round pen together twenty feet apart—our eyes locked on each other. The world has faded away and time has stopped. Nothing exists but our gaze.” I saw that, whether in the paddock or the barn, both watched each other closely.

  One of their favorite activities is the counting game. Karen holds out a carrot, and Lukas is not allowed to take it until Karen counts to three. Sometimes she counts one, two, three. But sometimes she counts one, two, fifty-nine, twenty-six, ninety-eight … It may be many seconds before she says “three.” You can see Lukas straining to control himself. Impulse control is not something we normally ascribe to high-strung Thoroughbreds, and yet, there it was, clear as day. He bends his neck and turns his head coyly, the better to keep watch. He wants that carrot. Every once in a while, his muzzle gets fairly close, but he catches himself. He won’t reach for it until Karen finally says the right word.

  Karen says Lukas holds the “world’s record” for the most numbers identified by a horse in only one minute. She also says, laughing, that she doesn’t know of any other horses who have yet competed for the title. She does suggest that Lukas’s performance may be an indication that he really can “count.” Maybe so. On the other hand, Lukas may simply be so well tuned to Karen’s psyche that he’s following her lead by watching body language so subtle that the rest of us don’t see it. Karen herself may not be aware of these cues. Lukas is, though. His huge eyes don’t miss a thing. Because horses live in small bands and depend for protection on other band horses, they are particularly sensitive to even the slightest shifts in posture—and in this case, his bandmate was Karen.

  It didn’t matter to me whether Lukas could count or not. I hadn’t come to find out whether horses were cleverly disguised Einsteins. Nor did I care about whether Lukas followed orders—bend your head, stand up on your legs. I had come for the dance. Their waltz was the more interesting when you consider that Lukas was once a very troubled horse. My sense of him is that he would still be a troubled horse, were it not for the bond he had formed with Karen. I once asked Karen whether she enjoyed riding him. “Oh,” she said, “he doesn’t really care for that.”

  Lukas ran a few races as a two-year-old. He didn’t win, but he did suffer two bowed tendons, fating him to spend the rest of his life in pain. Several people tried to train him as a riding horse, but either because of the pain or because of his temperament, those efforts failed.

  What do you do with a horse who can’t be safely ridden and who is
permanently lame? He passed through the hands of several people and developed a reputation as dangerous. He carried that hot-horse stigma from boarding barn to boarding barn. No one knew what to do with him. He had a lot of pent-up energy, but because of his tendons he couldn’t rid himself of that energy by doing what he’d been bred to do—run.

  Eventually, he was abandoned in a small pasture, left alone to fend for himself. Someone saw him, emaciated and needing a vet. She brought him home and put an ad in a local journal offering him as a “project” horse—meaning a horse that someone would have to work hard to rehabilitate. Karen bought him and found she had an enigma on her hands. She tried dressage with him, but Lukas remained unpredictable and rebellious.

  At that point, Karen began to look for alternatives. If she couldn’t “train” Lukas in the conventional sense of the word, maybe she could apply techniques learned from her job. She had been a nurse in a psychiatric ward, a career that involved placing herself in situations that were “intense, volatile, unpredictable,” she told me.

  Just like Lukas, I thought.

  She used the techniques she’d learned when working with the tougher hospital cases, the ones where saying no to a patient brings forth a powder keg explosion. I saw as she worked with Lukas that even now, long after her retirement from nursing, she is adept at using quiet, firm, consistent, gentle, and subtle shaping cues. This was the key to her success. I never heard the word “no,” but as the pair played with their numbers on the foldable table, Karen worked hard at helping Lukas stay within his prescribed boundaries. At times the horse edged toward what might be called excessive enthusiasm, and when he started to get wound up, his right front foot often inched just a tad outside the stall. Each time, Karen picked up the hoof and placed it back inside. There were no reprimands. Not a negative word. No shoves. Just shaping and consistency.