NYT columnist David Brooks gave out his yearly Sydney awards for intriguing and well-written essays. One of the essays was about the relationship between a predator (humans) and prey (the horse). It is a great read about how horse and rider work together to perform difficult tasks. I thought people here might enjoy this essay about how we interact with our horses.
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Not sure how I missed this the first time 'round, since I’ve been obsessed with the origins of this miracle for several years. It’s an interesting essay, though I disagree with the writer’s rather emo assessment that we should be evolutionary enemies.
I’d argue that that our early mutualism was set up as our species experienced the nexus of a frozen environment, equids’ unique adaptations to cold, and humans ability to track and hunt over long distances, activities that eventually looked more like herding. (Mutualism experts suggest we learned herding from wolves and inculcated wolf pups into our own packs, to make the whole Surviving Ice Ages™️ project, a little more successful.)
Weirdly, I got here in a search for David Brooks in the forums. I’m furious about his recent NYT column dissing Joe Biden, and thought someone might have mentioned it. It seems you’re a fan, so you may not be interested in my observations of the dude.
I’d rather talk about horses anyway. 
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I have her book! I highly recommend it.
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I have been waiting for the right thread to pass on a quote that got my attention.
It is from the book “Beyond Biomechanics: Biotensegrity” by Maren Diehl, on page 17.
“…horses seem to have an affinity to humans. If they had been as bitchy as zebras are a long time ago, world history would have been different. So there is a reasonable suspicion that the horse ancestors, for general fun and joy, decided to start a large-scale project for the development of humanity.”
Right now I suspect that this came from the knowledge that equines have that there can be water underground, an organism just has to dig down for it. Equids do this in arid lands. However humans can dig deeper than equids can, much deeper. Equids are very good at smelling water, did Arabian horses come up to humans as the Arabian peninsula got dryer and dryer, smelling the water that humans brought up from their deeper wells? Did an Arabian mare with her foal come up to a Bedouin, looking at the water with deep longing in her gorgeous eyes, did this human lay a skin on the ground over a depression, pour water in, then step back so this mare could come up and drink? Did Arabian horses hang around their humans ever since?
Just a pleasant fantasy I have had for decades ever since reading “Raswan’s Index.”
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I think her suspicion is more than reasonable. If you watch any of the Mongol herder videos (they’re short), you’ll see that the women and children manage the mares and foals almost exclusively. And they take a fair amount of managing, since mare’s milk is a staple of the herders’ diet. It’s clear too that the children have fun and take pride in their work.
Once you see a horse’s hoof as a spade turned backward, it’s impossible to unsee. No other ungulate has even remotely this foot. It’s great for uncovering water, and moving snow and ice aside for fodder. I love your mutualism story. I’d wager there was some give and take in the cold Pleistocene, too. Tolerating being followed by a group of two-legged predators, especially if they could clock that the equids were keeping the whole moveable feast viable, may have kept the equids a bit safer from other less discriminating four-legged hunters.
For any anthropologists here and in the new archeology finds thread, has it seemed weird to you that herding gets short shrift in discussions of the so-called progression toward civilization, i.e. organized agriculture. The step from hunting to herding seems almost invisible compared to the leap from foraging to organized plant cultivation, harvest and storage.
Thanks for the book rec.
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@sami-joe, if you are referring to the Biotensegrity book it is not an easy read for me. It has changed the way I look at horses bodies and I am having some problems getting out of the biomechanics paradigm that I spent half a century learning in detail.
The quoted paragraph is the easiest thing I’ve read in it so far.
The discussion on the horse’s fascia is very interesting, but I am having to deal with half a century of biomechanics. I am reasonably intelligent but reading about the fascia and biotensegrity is making me feel REALLY DUMB!!!
But one good thing about trying to read the books on the fascia is that so far I am content that my method of riding and training–Forward Seat ala Vladimir Littauer, is not causing the horses I ride problems as far as the fascia goes. From what I’ve read about Caprilli, who “invented” the Forward Seat in the late 19th and early 20th century, he LISTENED to the cavalry horses he rode. The Forward Seat is possibly the most in tune with the horse way of riding that any cavalry officer has ever developed, and is the least abusive way I can ride a horse, especially with my multiple nerve problems from my MS.
I listen to the horses I ride. If these horses tell me I suck I work to improve until the horse says I am doing stuff decently, often ignoring or not obeying my riding teachers. My current riding teacher accepts this gracefully and I have been riding with her for around 15 years.
I now think that the horse’s fasciae are the key to working around the problems of Not Quite Right lesson horses I ride. Luckily for me my riding teacher really enjoys it when I teach her new things about horsemanship so she is learning about fascia too as I tell her about what I am learning.
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While this may not be germane, I could not help thinking of the YT clips of ca WWI Italian cavalry (sound off, maybe) vs US military horsemen of the same era.
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I went on one trail ride with my riding teacher soon after I started taking lessons from her.
There was a steep, short slope. She said to lean back (how she had been trained after falling off her pony fox hunting when she was 4 years old.) I just could not get my body to lean back, at all. This is in spite of 4 years of trail riding in the foothills of the Andes mountains in Chile, where we were told to lean back, lean back, lean back and let those wonderful Criollo horses go down these lengthy slopes. I had watched several videos on line of horses going down steep slopes and jumping down the last 10 feet or so, and at that time, with my MS, there was no way I could stay on a horse if it decided to jump the last bit down if I was leaning back.
Decades ago trail riding I got to ride up and down some really steep slopes, and I always leaned forward and I was able to control my horse every step of the way, unlike riding the Criollos down those steep mountain sides where we depended on the good will of the horses not to decide to go elsewhere as they followed each other down the slopes.
As a side note the Chilean trail riding stable always sent a groom, a huaso (Chilean cowboy) with us. These intrepid men rode these steep mountain slopes BAREBACK.
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