Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Horse and Human as Artists

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. -Pablo Picasso

Until the early twentieth century, there was no real differentiation between art and craft. Prior to the industrial revolution, nearly all art served a functional purpose, either decorating a functional item, telling a culturally significant story, or accurately representing a person, place, or thing. While some art did contain an expressive element, the focus was very pragmatic.

Prior to the industrial era, most fine art was created as part of a system in which wealthy patrons essentially hired artists as part of their retinue. These creative professionals were very much tethered by the wills and whims of their patrons. While they might be allowed some artistic freedom, they were people who were hired to do a job to the satisfaction of their employer. This was true of all the creative professions including painters, dancers, dramatists, composers, and musicians.

Matters proceeded this way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Then, in the last century and a half, whamo! The whole system has changed. As a society, we now place great importance on the individual. The entire world of artistic creation has changed. Art is now valued for its expressive nature, its ability to present a message, a subject, a feeling - essentially to present anything, in a new and individual way.

Painters like Monet, Van Gough, Picasso, and Warhol changed the way we see the world by creating pieces that broke all the conventional rules of art. Today, being a good painter has little to do with your ability to perform conventional techniques, but rather, with your ability to express yourself in an innovative way. We have come to value the power of creativity over the mastery of existing modalities.

It is my belief that horsemanship is undergoing the same transformation. It is no longer enough to able to learn your teacher's methods perfectly, especially because most of these methods are grounded in the old schools of horsemanship, schools that put emphasis on obedience, regularity, structure, and force in order to create horses who are able to perform laborious, workaday tasks at the whim of their riders. Thankfully, we are seeing a shift towards the importance of individuality, creativity, and positive relationship.

Without this shift, horses are surely doomed in our society. To continue to treat them as though they serve the same purposes as they did in our pre-industrial society makes no sense. To shunt them off to the side, treating them as slaves to our pleasure whenever we feel like using them is a recipe for disaster and degrades everyone involved.

I have experienced the fallout of these traditional horsemanship attitudes in a very personal way through my work with rescue horses. A rescue where I volunteered had over one hundred head on a property designed for thirty. There were new arrivals weekly and many horses were turned away because there was simply no room. We had this enormous demand, even in a medium sized community served by several other rescue organizations. The horses we took in were only the cases of abuse that were reported by neighbors, or animals that were surrendered by owners who were at their wit's end. Every day, I see or hear about horses who are in as much need as any of the horses who walked through our gates but have no advocates to tell their stories.

The horses who arrived at the rescue were some combination of malnourished, neglected, beaten, abused, and terrified. The only thing they had done to deserve this fate was to not fit conveniently into someone's out-dated view of what a horse "should" be, regardless of the fact that this "should" is virtually impossible given the way horses are maintained today. How can we expect a trail horse to be perfectly obedient and totally fearless when he spends twenty-nine days a month living in a stall?

I don't mean to vilify the owners of these animals. Even if they were abusive towards their animals, I don't think most of them wanted to be. Horses are too expensive, both in terms of time and money, for someone to be involved in them for purely malevolent reasons. I think most horse abusers are simply afraid and uneducated.

As we grow up, we learn that mistakes are the worst things we can make and we become afraid of trying new things. It is not surprising that many people become trapped in old systems of training and ways of associating with horses. When those systems don't work, it is easy to feel like we are failures. That frustration has to go somewhere, and all to often we push it onto our horses instead of sharing joy with our them.

We must begin to see our relationships with our horses as the modern painters saw their canvases: not as a tool to an end, but as an open-ended means of limitless creative expression. We must view our horsemanship as a way to express a view of the world that is unique to our horses and our selves, a view that will inspire others, invoking in them the desire to express themselves equally freely and truly.

We don't even have to wonder if our horses will be our partners in this endeavor. Just as every human is born an artist, so is every horse. All we have to do is allow ourselves to regain the creative freedom of a child. We can refrain from conditioning the expressive natures out of our horses with training methods meant to create obedient tools rather than joyful partners. We can be with them in a way that not only retains our individual dignities, but grows them together, creating something bigger than ourselves.

This attitude of horse and human as artists is the attitude we wanted to convey to every volunteer at the rescue. We were lucky, in that most of the volunteers came to us with no knowledge of how to work with horses, just a desire to be a part of their lives. We paired our horses with volunteers who fit their personalities and emotional needs, gave them some basic tools for positive reinforcement, and then set them loose to discover each other. Mostly we tried to stay out of the way and let them create whatever seemed natural.

We didn't have them focus on "training" the horse to do any of the traditional riding behaviors. We wanted them to work from what the horse offered, allowing them to organically address issues created by previous traditional training. The funny thing is, they always got there, and in periods of time that would be considered fast for a professional trainer working with an unstarted horse rather than an amateur nurturing an abused soul.

What made the difference was acceptance, creativity, love. We weren't trying to make the horses fit into a mold or act a certain way. We simply gave them what they needed to be confident and allowed them to express themselves. Then we were truly playing together, acting as the artists we were born to be.