I have always found it fascinating that we call horses flight animals. As if the thing that most defines them is their primary stress response. It is often the first thing people offer as a response to the question, who is the horse?

Letting a stress response dominate how we see a species, I think it is fair to conclude that freeze is the predominant stress response in humans, or perhaps please/appease/fawn?

Other ways we define horses is by what they eat – they are grazing (or browsing animals) and therefore they are herbivores, one-stomached herbivores (in contrast to cows or sheep that are ruminators, not fermenters, like horses).

It is so easy for humans to put our human ways of being onto horses. Seldom do we even notice it or notice it when others do it. If something sounds like a plausible explanation, we often just take it for the truth. Especially if it fills a gap in our story about horses. We humans don’t like gaps – the human mind always strives to fill the gaps. We do not like “not knowing”. And we like a nice and coherent “story”.

I love the space of not knowing – it is where exploration lives. Where imagination lives. Where experimenting and innovating lives. Where creativity lives…

I like when things are open. When humans are open to multiple ways of seeing and understanding.

I am still pondering this how I “see” horses… and how I teach about that “seeing”, how I facilitate courses inviting to different ways of “seeing”.

Have you seen the Netflix film “My Octopus Teacher”? It is a story of a man who for one year dives down to meet the same octopus every day – and what he learns from observing her, interacting with her, being in her environment – and so on. I think it is a remarkable film. It got critiqued, from a researcher for not being more “scientific”, for mixing human emotions and growth with more pure “behavioral studies”. Still, he consulted with 3 octopus scientists while doing the film. The science is there, but the way he presents it makes it more accessible to people. And it brings about questions as animal welfare, animal capabilities when it comes to emotions, playfulness, bonding etc. See it if you have no done so.

As I find my own ways of doing things, that includes the whole of me and all that I know, in all the ways I know them – I find myself wanting to pursue putting together more of a whole plate. I don’t want to keep to “just science”, neither do I want to not include it… I think by marrying a lot of different perspectives and ways of seeing, we deepen and broaden pictures.