It’s one of those philosophy of mind conundrums, where you’re stuck using English words anthropomorphising an animal’s experience because you haven’t got any other way to understand it and you don’t know what that experience is. You don’t even know what another human’s experience is, to be fair, because you can’t be in anyone else’s head.
Will an animal go to great lengths to avoid being eaten by a predator out of pure reductive Darwinian extinct, as though it’s nothing more than a computer program running an algorithm to preserve its genes? Or is there something more? Does the horse take pleasure out of grazing, galloping with its mates, working with its humans? Does it want to stay alive so it can continue enjoying those things? Even animal science is pulling well away from reductionism and coming up with all these studies showing some animals anyway experience emotions. Stuff people who work with animals already knew, but behavioural science had spent so long being stuck in Skinnerian reductionism that it was something of a paradigm shift.
I don’t think its fuzzy anthropomorphism to talk about self-preservation, and what seems plain to me, that some horses have more than others. I’ve seen one horse move cautiously over slippery footing, while its barnmate will go over it without caring. I’ve had my horse refuse to go up a trail where a mountain lion was (later) sighted, or hesitate if asked to go over dodgy ground. Once she refused to go where I was asking so our trail buddy went first and sunk above his knees in mud. Had a bit of faff getting out. I’m pretty sure my horse said, “Told you so!” That’s probably anthropomorphism.
We have all heard about blind bolters, horses who will run through or over anything without giving any fucks, while most of us have come across horses who might take off, but will at least keep themselves safe – and you if you can stay aboard.
I don’t think anyone can deny that they have emotions and some kind of cognitive process, and we’re stuck using our language, relating it through our experiences. That’s anthropomorphism, but if we agree that they have emotion and cognition, do we have any other way of talking about animals? Excise the language of human emotion, and we’re back to reductionism. But no one does that. Horse owners don’t talk in the language of behaviourism, nor to they reduce the horse to a collection of muscles, neurons and neurotransmitters. “My horse is experiencing lots of cortisol and other stress hormones flooding his brain as a conditioned response to his stablemate being removed from the barn.” Yeah, no one says that. They say, “My horse misses his buddy.” Or “My horse doesn’t like being on his own.” That’s attributing human feelings to the horse. But at the same time, it describes the behaviour in a useful way, meaning the horse owner’s friend or trainer (and the owner herself) can understand the owner when she describes her horse’s pronlem, and everyone will agree that the horse is having some kind of negative experience that he would not be having if his stablemate didn’t leave the barn.
Does the flipper care more or less about its safety than a horse who quietly accepts a rider? It’s arguable that it cares more, because if a mountain lion jumps on a horse’s back, it will flip on top of it as a last ditch effort. It’s also arguable that if a horse feels that whatever humans are asking it to do is akin to having a mountain lion on its back, something has gone very wrong. Perhaps with its head, because most domestic horses tolerate even bad riding without resorting to flipping.
Does the horse percieve consequences of actions? They obviously do to some extent, because otherwise you couldn’t train them. But do they have enough forethought to consider, “I might get stuck in that mud,” or “If I rear and fall over on my rider, I could badly injure myself. But screw it, I’m doing it anyway.” It’s safe to say that a flipper has a different idea of self-preservation than the horse that doesn’t flip. Most horses would rather get along with the human than throw themselves on the floor. Who knows what goes through the mind of a flipper, or any horse, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to ride one!
