The Soul of a Horse (2 page)

2

The Student

I
remember that it was an unusually chilly day for late May, because I recall the jacket I was wearing. Not so much the jacket, I suppose, as the collar. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing at full attention, and the collar was scratching at them.

There was no one else around. Just me and this eleven-hundred-pound creature I had only met once before. And today he was passing out no clues as to how he felt about that earlier meeting, or about me. His stare was without emotion. Empty. Scary to one who was taking his very first step into the world of horses.

If he chose to do so this beast could take me out with no effort whatsoever. He was less than fifteen feet away. No halter, no line. We were surrounded by a round pen a mere fifty feet in diameter. No place to hide. Not that he was mean. At least I had been told that he wasn’t. But I also had been told that anything is possible with a horse. He’s a prey animal, they had said. A freaky flight animal that can flip from quiet and thoughtful to wild and reactive in a single heartbeat. Accidents happen.

I knew very little about this horse, and none of it firsthand. Logic said do not depend upon hearsay. Be sure. There’s nothing like firsthand knowledge. But all I knew was what I could see. He was big.

The sales slip stated that he was unregistered. And his name was Cash.

But there was something about him. A kindness in his eyes that betrayed the vacant expression. And sometimes he would cock his head as if he were asking a question. I wanted him to be more than chattel. I wanted a relationship with this horse. I wanted to begin at the beginning, as Monty Roberts had prescribed: Start with a blank sheet of paper, then fill it in.

Together.

I’m not a gambler. Certainty is my mantra. Knowledge over luck. But on this day I was gambling.

I had never done this before.

I knew dogs.

I did not know horses.

And I was going to ask this one to do something he had probably never been asked to do in his lifetime. To make a choice. Which made me all the more nervous. What if it didn’t work?

What if his choice was not
me
?

I
WAS IN
that round pen because a few weeks earlier my wife, Kathleen, had pushed me out of bed one morning and instructed me to get dressed and get in the car.

“Where are we going?” I asked several times.

“You’ll see.”

Being the paranoid, suspicious type, whenever my birthday gets close, the ears go up and twist in the wind.

The brain shuffled and dealt. Nothing came up.

We drove down the hill and soon Kathleen was whipping in at a sign for the local animal shelter.

Another dog?
I wondered. We have four. Four’s enough.

She drove right past the next turn for the animal shelter and pulled into a park. There were a few picnic tables scattered about. And a big horse trailer.

The car jerked to a stop and Kathleen looked at me and smiled. “Happy birthday,” she said.

“What?” I said. “What??”

“You said we should go for a trail ride sometime.” She grinned. “
Sometime
is today.”

Two weeks later we owned three horses.

We should’ve named them Impulsive, Compulsive, and Obsessive.

O
UR HOUSE IS
way out in the country and it came with a couple of horse stalls, both painted a crisp white, one of them covered with a rusty red roof. They were cute. Often, over the three years we had lived there, we could be found in the late afternoon sitting on our front porch, looking out over the stalls, watching the sun sink beneath the ridge of mountains to the west. One of us would say, “Those stalls surely seem empty.” Or “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a couple of horses ambling back and forth down in the stalls?”

Like a postcard.

A lovely picture at sunset.

With cute horse stalls.

Lesson #1: Cute horse stalls are not adequate reason to purchase three horses.

Never mind the six we own now.

We had no idea what we were getting into. Thank God for a chance meeting with Monty Roberts. Well, not a
real
meeting. We were making the obligatory trip that new horse owners must make to Boot Barn when Kathleen picked up a
California Horse Trader.
As we sat around a table watching the kids chomp cheeseburgers, she read an article about Monty and passed it over to me. That’s how I came to find myself in a round pen that day staring off our big new Arabian.

Monty is an amazing man, with an incredible story. His book
The Man Who Listens to Horses
has sold something like five and a half million copies and was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for fifty-eight weeks! You might know him as the man who inspired Robert Redford’s film
The Horse Whisperer.
I ordered his book and a DVD of one of his Join-Up demonstrations the minute I got home, and was completely blown away. In the video, he took a horse that had never had as much as a halter on him, never mind a saddle or rider, and in thirty minutes caused that horse to
choose
to be with him, to accept a saddle, and a rider, all with no violence, pain, or even stress to the horse!

Thirty minutes!

It takes “traditional” horse trainers weeks to get to that point, the trainers who still tie a horse’s legs together and crash him to the ground, then spend days upon days scaring the devil out of him, proving to the horse that humans are, in fact, the predators he’s always thought we were. They usually get there, these traditional trainers, but it’s by force, and submission, and fear. Not trust or respect.

Or choice.

In retrospect, for me, the overwhelming key to what I saw Monty do in thirty minutes is the fact that the horse made the decision, the choice. The horse chose Monty as a herd member and leader. And from that point on, everything was built on trust, not force. And what a difference that makes.

And it was simple.

Not rocket science.

I watched the DVD twice and was off to the round pen.

It changed my life forever.

This man is responsible for us beginning our relationship with horses as it
should
begin, and propelling us onto a journey of discovery into a truly enigmatic world. A world that has reminded me that you cannot, in fact, tell a book by its cover; that no “expert” should ever be beyond question just because somebody somewhere has given him or her such a label. That everybody and everything is up for study. That logic and good sense still provide the most reasonable answers, and still, given exposure, will prevail.

My first encounter with this lesson was way back when I was making the original Benji movie, my very first motion picture.

On a trip from Dallas to Hollywood to interview film labs and make a decision about which one to use, I discovered that intelligent, conscientious, hardworking people can sometimes make really big mistakes because they don’t ask enough questions, or they take something for granted, or, in some cases, they just want to take the easiest way. In this case it was about how our film was to be finished in the lab, and my research had told me that a particular method (we’ll call it Method B) was the best way to go. Everyone at every lab I visited, without exception, said, Oh no, no. Method A is the best way. When asked why, to a person, they all said, Because that’s the way it’s always been done! In other words, Don’t rock the boat.

Not good enough, said I. My research shows that Method B will produce a better finished product, and that’s what we want.

Finally, the manager of one of the smaller labs I visited scratched his head and said, “Well, I guess that’s why David Lean uses Method B.”

I almost fell out of my chair. For you youngsters, David Lean was the director of such epic motion pictures as
Dr. Zhivago
and
Lawrence of Arabia.
I had my answer. And, finally, I knew I wasn’t crazy.

It’s still a mystery to me how people can ignore what seems so obvious, so logical, simply because it would mean
change
. Even though the change is for the better. I say look forward to the opportunity to learn something new. Relish and devour knowledge with gusto. Always be reaching for the best possible way to do things. It keeps you alive, and healthy, and happy. And makes for a better world.

Just because something has
always been done
a certain way does not necessarily mean it’s the best way, or the correct way, or the healthiest way for your horse, or your relationship with your horse, or your life. Especially if, after asking a few questions, the traditional way defies logic and good sense, and falls short on compassion and respect.

The truth is, too many horse owners are shortening their horses’ lives, degrading their health, and limiting their happiness by the way they keep and care for them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Information is king. Gather it from every source, make comparisons, and evaluate results. And don’t take just one opinion as gospel. Not mine or anyone else’s. Soon you’ll not only feel better about what you’re doing, you’ll do it better. And the journey will be fascinating.

We were just a year and a half into this voyage with horses when these words found their way into the computer, but it was an obsessive, compulsive year and a half, and the wonderful thing about being a newcomer is that you start with a clean plate. No baggage. No preconceptions. No musts. Just a desire to learn what’s best for our horses, and for our relationship with them. And a determination to use logic and knowledge wherever found, even if it means exposing a few myths about what does, in fact, produce the best results. In short, I’ll go with Method B every time.

C
ASH WAS PAWING
the ground now, wondering, I suspect, why I was just standing there in the round pen doing nothing. The truth is I was reluctant to start the process. Nervous. Rejection is not one of my favorite concepts. Once I started, I would soon be asking him to make his choice. What if he said no? Is that it? Is it over? Does he go back to his previous owner?

I have often felt vulnerable during my sixty-eight years, but rarely
this
vulnerable. I really
wanted
this horse to choose me.

What if I screw it up? Maybe I won’t do it right. It’s my first time. What if he runs over me?
Actually, that was the lowest on my list of concerns because Monty’s Join-Up process is built on the language of the horse, and the fact that the raw horse inherently perceives humans as predators. Their response is flight, not fight. It’s as automatic as breathing.

Bite the bullet, Joe,
I kept telling myself. Give him the choice.

I had vowed that this would be our path. We would begin our relationship with every horse in this manner. Our way to true horsemanship, which, as I would come to understand, was not about how well you ride, or how many trophies you win, or how fast your horse runs, or how high he or she jumps.

I squared my shoulders, stood tall, looked this almost sixteen hands of horse straight in the eye, appearing as much like a predator as I could muster, and tossed one end of a soft long-line into the air behind him, and off he went at full gallop around the round pen. Just like Monty said he would.

Flight.

I kept my eyes on his eyes, just as a predator would. Cash would run for roughly a quarter of a mile, just as horses do in the wild, before he would offer his first signal. Did he actually think I was a predator, or did he know he was being tested? I believe it’s somewhere in between, a sort of leveling of the playing field. A starting from scratch with something he knows ever so well. Predators and flight. A simulation, if you will. Certainly he was into it. His eyes were wide; his nostrils flared. At the very least he wasn’t sure about me, and those fifty-five million years of genetics were telling him to flee.

It was those same genetics that caused him to offer the first signal. His inside ear turned and locked on me, again as Monty had predicted. Cash had run the quarter of a mile that usually preserves him from most predators, but I was still there, and not really seeming very predatory. So now, instead of pure reactive flight, he was getting curious. Beginning to
think
about it. Maybe he was even a bit confused. Horses have two nearly separate brains. Some say one is the reactive brain and the other is the thinking brain. Whether or not that’s true physiologically, emotionally it’s a good analogy. When they’re operating from the reactive side, the rule of thumb is to stand clear until you can get them thinking. Cash was now shifting. He was beginning to think.
Hmm, maybe this human is not a predator after all. I’ll just keep an ear out for a bit. See what happens.