The Power of the Herd. Linda Kohanov
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with great difficulty or self-righteousness. But this same highly evolved behavior exists, sometimes effortlessly, in nature. My horse Shadowfax, named for the wizard’s magical mount in Lord of the Rings, was one such gifted individual. In 2004, he exhibited an uncannily supernatural level of emotional intelligence in socializing a couple of unruly stud colts.
I met Shadowfax at a breeding and training facility in Michigan. As a guest clinician at TN Farms, I was leading a variety of activities under a massive grove of oaks and maples when my attention was drawn to a nearby pasture. There an agile, well-muscled Appaloosa stallion was grazing and cavorting with his own weanling sons, something that few domesticated horses are allowed to do. (Most intact males are kept isolated for fear they might hurt their children.) Though only five years old, Shadowfax knew how to gently set boundaries with his feisty boys, playfully herd them around the pasture, and affectionately groom them. I was so impressed with his natural combination of power and gentleness that I bought one of his sons, a striking red-and-white yearling named Sage.
Several months later, when Shadowfax was up for sale, I brought him to Arizona. Sage remembered his father, calling out to him as soon as he got off the trailer. The first night, I was moved to see Shadowfax nuzzling his long-lost son over the fence. The next day, however, the younger horse attempted a brutal leadership coup. At that time, Sage and my two-year-old Arabian stud colt, Spirit, were going through the most fretful, inherently dangerous period of male adolescence, challenging their four-legged and two-legged elders. Hell-bent on intimidating Shadowfax the first time they were turned out with him, they pulled out all the stops — kicking, striking, rushing in to bite.
The wise old man of six years didn’t even panic, thoughtfully assessing the situation while staying out of harm’s way. Then, as each colt reared over him, he lifted his front legs off the ground just high enough to lean into the youngster’s shoulder, effectively knocking the aggressor off balance. Sage and Spirit ended up on the ground several times before they realized the move was intentional. Shadowfax seemed to be performing a kind of equine aikido, using the challenger’s flamboyant yet unstable energy against him. Then he’d stand over the dazed and astonished colt, staring him down, pawing the earth right next to his head, clearly demonstrating his superior power, ingenuity — and restraint. By the end of the day, he was softly licking the face of his son and quietly milling around the corral with Spirit.
Trainer Mark Rashid might say that Shadowfax exhibited the traits of a “passive leader.” Here the word passive refers not to inaction but to the fact that such a horse doesn’t actively fight his way to dominance or obsessively try to control everyone else’s behavior. Instead, as Rashid writes in Horses Never Lie: The Heart of Passive Leadership, he or she “leads by example, not force.” This horse is “extremely dependable and confident, one that the vast majority of horses will not only willingly choose to follow, but actually seek out.”
Studies of both wild and domesticated herds show that even though aggressive alpha-style leaders win the right to eat and drink first, these horses mostly succeed in alienating others. Their antics may be impressive to thrill-seeking humans, but if you sit down and really watch the rest of the herd, you’ll notice most horses following more settled individuals around. Rashid once watched an alpha horse named Scooter “single-handedly keep no less than ten horses away from a water tank,” launching full-blown attacks on a couple of horses and holding the rest at bay with menacing glances. The author saw a completely different dynamic unfold with satellite bands that approached the tank after Scooter finished. “In almost every case,” he writes, “the passive leader would begin to drink while the others stood quietly nearby. Once the leader had taken several swallows from the tank, the others would slowly move in and they would all drink together. There were no threats, no attacks, and no fearful reactions. When the leader left the tank, the others willingly followed.”
Watching one such mare effortlessly lead a herd of ten happy devotees, Rashid noted that she was “unfazed by her popularity and appeared to accept the others as if they had been buddies all their lives. The little band that followed her never seemed to get into arguments, living in relative peace whenever they were all together.” In situations that would easily drive less experienced herd members into flight-or-fight mode, this mare truly knew how to “hold her horses.”
Through my own experiences watching the intricacies of herd behavior, I’ve come to realize that “survival of the fittest” demands more than physical prowess. It involves the ability to conserve energy for true emergencies — or at least recognize and follow those who do. Most horses, Rashid insists, seek out a leader “that they know won’t cause them unnecessary stress or aggravation,” someone with “quiet confidence, dependability, consistency, and a willingness not to use force.”
While Rashid calls this quieter style of herd management passive leadership, the term doesn’t quite fit a horse like Shadowfax. Though he was eventually gelded as a form of birth control, the still-spirited yet poised Appaloosa continued to insist on a certain level of respect and deference: He didn’t hesitate to up the ante when someone challenged his authority. Over time, I began referring to him as a mature alpha, a horse with the natural energy and inclination to assert dominance while also demonstrating restraint and concern for the well-being of others, one who balanced individual needs and group needs, using the least possible amount of friction or violence. After all, stallions who spend a good part of the afternoon beating each other up at the water tank are that much slower, and lamer, when running from a predator who’s been lounging in the sun all day.
Conserving energy in this way may not seem like a vital survival issue for domesticated horses and civilized humans, but it’s actually an important element in any successful endeavor. Businesses with significant internal strife have trouble doing business. Temperamental film directors go over budget and fall behind schedule. Bands of moody rock musicians break up at the height of their popularity. Politicians who inflame and manipulate public sentiments have trouble passing effective legislation. And horses who spook at every little thing lose in the show arena.
War and Peace
The good news is that while dominance and aggression may be hard-to-break habits, they’re not necessarily hardwired. Primatologists have found that a lesser-known species of ape, the bonobo, can claim just as much kinship to humans as the chimp. Yet the bonobo prefers cooperative, conciliatory behavior; the females generally step forward to greet potential rivals with affectionate, peacemaking gestures and will often interpose themselves between males escalating toward a fight. Zoologist Frans de Waal calls it “survival of the kindest.”
Even baboons, known for intensely aggressive behavior, seem to have less of a gene for dominance than a persistent custom of it. When the notoriously hostile alphas of a Kenya-based troop claimed, as usual, first dibs on the food, in this case a pile of garbage, they promptly died off from a nasty dose of tainted meat. The surviving low-ranking males, females, and children subsequently underwent what New York Times science writer Natalie Angier characterized as “a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the unusually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites.” The shift has persisted for two decades now. Even new males entering the group adhere to the unspoken guidelines of this gentler baboon subculture.
In his book Field Notes on the Compassionate Life, Marc Ian Barasch joins scientists like de Waal in speculating that “if bonobos instead of chimps had been taken as the prehuman model, the killer-ape crowd would never have gotten such traction. The scientific premise about our primate inheritance — and hence our modern assumptions about our basic nature — might have stressed equality of the sexes, familial bonds, and peacemaking rather than male dominance hierarchies and naked aggression.”
Yet science itself may have been going through its own fretful adolescence when it latched onto examples in nature to justify our culture’s penchant for conquest, competition, and dominion over all the earth’s creatures. Since the equestrian arts were originally perfected for the ultimate dominance tactic — namely, war — horsemanship has also, at times, suffered from the same prejudicial perspective. In war, no one is exempt from being treated as a means to an end. Every soldier, and the horse he rode in on, must override fear,