Often, when I am feeding animals, watering plants, attacking the evil cocksfoot clumps that are intent upon strangling my young native trees – I talk to myself – sometimes I even talk aloud. Yes, crazy old lady territory but a major advantage of getting older is, I no longer give a damn what people think of me.
Whilst watering young trees the other day, I was thinking about all the crazy shit that's going on inside the neo-liberal bubble and I looked up to see the three mares who live here with me – Sally, Molly and Mandy (I kid you not) peering over the fence at me as if concerned for my mental well-being.
Are you all right, crazy but kind person, they seemed to be asking.
Always pleased to have an audience I began to explain to them just how crazy humans are.
Like them, I said, we humans are social creatures, profoundly so. And hierarchical. We probably didn't start out hierarchical but we have become status-crazy, and like horses we engage in all sorts of behaviours and practices to establish and reinforce hierarchy.
Often the most extreme hierarchy-reinforcing or challenging behaviours among horses (stallion behaviour aside) occur among the younger horses which may jostle for a step up the status ladder. But in every herd there are the stabilisers, the peace-keepers, those whose calm, measured approach to the business of living serves to ensure peace and order. Sometimes there's an alpha mare but usually the natural equine herd – which is fairly small in number – is managed by a coalition of the mature and sensible.
Like horses, many humans are forced to live in ways that are demonstrably harmful, such as being socially isolated and/or confined in species-inappropriate spaces, and/or forced into species-inappropriate behaviours. As a result, some become damaged and behave in anti-social ways. Sometimes the anti-social behaviour is so harmful to the group, the damaged one is driven out, but sometimes where circumstances result in them remaining in the group, a damaged one becomes dominant and adversely affects others by its pathological conduct.
Also like horses, we humans are suffering from the ill-effects of unnatural lifestyle and exposure to a mass of chemicals in our food and wider environment which leads to metabolic (and possibly reproductive) disequilibrium.
It has been established that what is called metabolic syndrome in horses (obesity, accumulation of visceral fat, hindgut disturbances and laminitis) has been linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals in forage and grain. It's probable there's also an increase in the equine equivalent of polycystic ovary syndrome in mares which results in increased testosterone, reduced fertility, and stallion like behaviours. If male horses were left entire, it's also possible we would see a similar reduction in sperm quality as has been charted in human males globally over the past half century.
In the equine world, as in the human one, it is the females which are the most important to, and heavily invested in species reproduction - the driving force behind all life. Unlike humans in the modern world, among equines it is the females which are socially most dominant. The stallion parades around protecting his mares from other stallions, but it is the mares which run the show.
Horses, like all mammals, are sexually dimorphic ie there are observable physical differences between females and males other than genitalia. Unlike some of our primate cousins, we humans exhibit moderate sexual dimorphism, while equines are further towards the less side of the sexual dimorphism spectrum. In both species, the easily observable differences between the extremes of each sex are greater than the average differences between the two sexes.
The visible differences in the size and appearance of a mare and a stallion are slight; the mare may have a slightly longer back and the stallion may have a neck crest. Athletically there is no difference – although there may be a human prejudice against mares – the world record for the fastest gallop over a mile is held by a thoroughbred mare.
This athletic equivalency is because the horse was a steppe and prairie dwelling herbivore which lived in small herds and whose defence mechanisms against predators were (still are) – growing fast, sleeping mostly upright once mature, having acute hearing, sense of smell and almost 360 degree vision, having hair-trigger reactions and being able to sprint very fast over short distances and run at moderate speed over much longer distances. Like us, the horse has a long gestation, but the foal is up and walking quickly, and because of its small body and long legs, it is quickly able to run very fast and is highly manoeuvrable.
For the mare to be smaller and slower – to have muscular and biomechanical differences which made them less efficient runners than the males – would make no evolutionary sense.
We differ from equines in being continuous breeders and in terms of ovulation signalling. When mares come into oestrus they signal that state by copious amounts of hormone laced pee, vulva eversion (winking), posturing, and squealing. Human ovulation signals are hidden or perhaps so subtle our dulled senses no longer register them.
The reasons for this are the subject of scholarly interest and as with all things reproductive, that interest may be heavily influenced by an ideological agenda. More on that later perhaps.
Our 'success' as a species is rooted in our high sociability and extreme adaptability. Horses are just as social as us and moderately adaptable and it is those qualities that both motivated and enabled us to exploit the horse – an exploitation which arguably shaped the modern world as we know it as much as the development of agriculture.
In zoological terms, we humans are highly adaptable, omnivorous generalists which moved from living within and as part of the natural world, to acting upon it, altering it, and exploiting it. By so doing we have also irreparably harmed it.
This state of human affairs was enabled by a complex interaction of abilities and attributes flowing from those high levels of adaptability and sociability, being bi-pedal and having an opposing thumb, and having a big, energy-demanding brain.
The ability to reflect, to develop complex language, not being tied to a seasonal cycle of oestrus, and having weaker instinctual drives to mate led us to wrap up the foundational biological facts of species reproduction – ie both the fact of having a sex and the act of having sex – in a mass of often obfuscating myth and ritual.
Within phallocratic societies, that mass of myth and ritual was – and still is – tied tightly with ideological ribbons which look pretty in their heavily gendered colours but serve as a sex-role straitjacket.
By this stage in the lecture the mares were getting a bit restless so I thought I'd keep their attention by pointing out a consequence – to them – of what became the dominant human view of reproduction in androcentric/phallocratic societies, ie the way that male humans placed the stallion at the centre of horse breeding.
In earlier eras these myopic chaps had the excuse of not knowing the female contributes 50% of the genes but they had no excuse for ignoring the easily observable fact that the mare contributes 100% of the gestational, ante-natal nutritional, protection and social needs of the foal – within a mildly hierarchical but essentially cooperative and female-dominated social structure.
But such was – and still is – the dumbing and numbing effect of phallocentric ideology, men determined that all the desirable characteristics of a foal lay in the stallion's sperm. The mare was merely a vessel.
My mares did not look impressed.
Of course powerful men did not apply this idiotic notion fully to their own situations. For the rich and powerful throughout stratified history, marriage and child bearing/rearing was primarily strategic and aimed at merging fortunes, forming and strengthening alliances and dynasties, but they were also well aware of the genetic need for reproductive and wider health and good looks in their spouses to off-set the ill-effects of generations of in-breeding.
By now the mares were getting bored with the crazy lady and they began to think about eating.
And that's another thing, I said, being a herbivore means eating loads of vegetation (for the horse a wide range of grasses and leafy material for 16+ hours a day) and having a huge gut to be able to extract sufficient nutrition, while we omnivorous, bi-pedal, big-headed (literally and metaphorically) primates have developed ways of producing not just the means of day-to-day subsistence, but vast surpluses of energy-rich foods and the means to store and to trade those surpluses which all adds up to allowing humans way too much time and spare energy to think up a host of daft notions such as, we as a species are somehow separate from, and superior to the natural world we inhabit.
And the even dafter notion that our bodies are somehow separate from, and inferior to a disembodied internal essence, or soul, or gendered self....
By this time Sally, Molly and Mandy had decided I was a lost cause and wandered off to rest and discuss matters-equine in the shade.
I was left to ponder what makes a happy horse. Food security. Fresh air and cool, clean water. Space to roam and to run on healthy, well-formed feet. Shade and shelter. The company of others of its own kind.
We should learn from them.
