Monty Roberts - The Man Who Listens to Horses

[miriam_e]

I finished reading this -- a very easy read and fascinating. It has long been my belief that being cruel to animals is not just wrong, morally, but counterproductive. This book bears that out. "Conventional" breaking of a horse, which amounts to little more than a concentrated program of torture designed to break the horse's will, takes weeks of effort, during which the horse is often physically as well as mentally damaged.

As a child Monty Roberts came to adore horses and wanted to understand how they communicated among themselves. He eventually learned this language -- he calls it "EQUUS" -- which is not verbal, but a system of body signals. Using that he is able to convince wild or mistreated horses to trust him.

He has shown that instead of taking three weeks of cruelty to subjugate a horse, forcing it to do what a person wants, he can get a wild horse take a rider in about half an hour because it trusts him and wants to do it!

How much better to have a horse be your willing, thinking, helpful partner than to be your reluctant slave?

He tried communicating with deer this way too, after he found an injured wild one. With slight variations it turned out to be the same language. He has been able to befriend several deer this way. They want to be near him because they trust and like him, following him around instead of fleeing, even though they are still wary of other people.

This is rivetting stuff. It gives us a hint of how we could enrich our existence by truly being guardians of this planet, with our fellow creatures being willing allies. If, on the other hand, we continue to push other species into ever more limited and constrained lives where they are allowed to survive only at our condescending whim, then we become the kind of monsters that kept human slaves, devaluing their lives and perverting our own lives simultaneously.

It makes sense to treat all life humanely, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because we stand to gain immeasurably from it.