08/10/2024
Love note & cheers to the sensitive ones, and a reminder that your anger can be a signal that you notice an injustice occurring. Well-written as always, Tania .
[Author's note. I wrote this yesterday and did not post it. I was quite cross and Mabel-ish and I didn't necessarily want to get into all that. I wanted to keep up the theme of love which came back with me from the Warwick Schiller summit. But then I read the story again this morning and I thought I'll let it stand. There is an important question in there, and we can't shy away from the important questions. So here's me, getting a bit grumpy about people tumbling into red mare stereotypes. As I so often say - every day can't be Doris Day.]
I was just having a gentle morning and feeling profoundly grateful for my quiet week off when the algorithm elves decided to mess with me. I had a quick peek on Facebook and it decided to send me a video entitled ‘You ask a chestnut mare to walk.’ I had an instant sinking feeling. I knew it wasn’t going to be about a lovely walk on a loose rope, with some excellent personal space and a delightful dash of Standing Still Olympics at the end. And of course it wasn’t. It was a highly activated mare who was getting absolutely no help with her emotions and everyone was laughing at her and someone said, ‘She’s fu***ng mental.’
Imagine that you were a prey animal who had evolved for fifty-five million years to stay alive in the face of hordes of predators, and you were having one of those moments when all the mountain lions in your mind were coming for you and you were convinced you were going to die, and you were trying to inform the weird two-legged species who has only been around for 300,000 years about some of this and they were scoffing and telling you that you were nuts in the head. I might - and I’m just saying might - feel a little bit fed up, in that situation.
My Mabel is yelling, and I’m trying to calm her down. I’m saying lots of nice rational things like, ‘People can’t know what they don’t know.’ And that really is true. Mabel wants to holler that mares are bloody brilliant and that being chestnut is not even a thing and that people could read a book. My rational self is reminding me that prejudices have to be learned, and that I’m incredibly lucky that nobody taught me to sneer at mares or thoroughbreds or redheads. I’m ludicrously fortunate that I got the red mare, who taught me all the most valuable things about life, and who made me rise to meet her on the higher plane where she lives.
And talking of the red mare - even though we’ve been on two adventures since I’ve got back and she has been mighty, I’ve noticed the faint worry lines are creasing over her eyes and I’d been thinking today that I need to pause, and slow down, and pay close attention, and ask her what she needs. Horses, even ones as expressive as she is, can be so stoical that sometimes we hurried humans miss the subtle signs. I don’t think she’s got anything wrong, but I think she’s telling me there is something which is not quite, quite right.
So, since choice is at the heart of everything, I’m going to choose not to go on being enraged over disobliging remarks about chestnut mares. I’m going to choose to do something lovely for my own chestnut mare. I choose gratitude and action instead of muttering and fury. They nearly got me, those algorithm elves. But I’m not such an easy catch.
PS. Even though I'm being very grown-up about this, I would quite like to know what you do when you see people being unfair to horses. Even though it sort of isn't their fault that they don't know what they don't know, and blame and recrimination are not useful, I do find it can press quite a lot of buttons. Usually I let Mabel have a shout - often here - and then I stomp it off and return to my mission of trying to make the world a little brighter, one happy horse at a time. (I have a red mare domino theory. One person reads her stories and tells another person and so the torch is passed, from field to field.) But it is a great sadness to me that horses have done so much for humans, over the millennia, and I don't think they yet get the love and awe and respect they deserve. I'm still developing an emotional processing tool for that fact. One day, it will be ready, and I'll know precisely what to do, on the spot.
