11/07/2025
Trudi, as always, with incredible insights and a beautiful way with words.
The Human Herd
Spend any time in the horse world and you quickly realise it’s just a microcosm of life in the big world. Regular folks with a common interest.
Last month, another online storm rolled through the equestrian community. It began, as they often do, with a line in a post, a claim that perhaps was taken out of context. Within hours it had been shared, condemned, defended, and dissected. People lined up on either side.
It could have been about anything. Stabling, diet, training, tack. This time it happened to be laminitis, but the subject really doesn’t matter. What matters to me is the pattern.
Because if you stand back for long enough, you start to see the same psychology repeating itself.
One person speaks.
A few people react.
Others join in.
Now it can just fade away at that point. This one didn’t.
Soon it became less about what was said, or whether it was true, and more about who belongs where. Who is in the right camp. Who is safe to stand beside.
It is an odd dynamic, strangely human.
The online horse world is a perfect storm for this kind of social behaviour. It is small, intense, full of emotion. Everyone wants to do right by their horses. Everyone has been told, at some point, that they are doing it wrong. Most definitely there have been times when I was doing it wrong.
Add in social media’s appetite for outrage and you have a recipe for chaos.
The platforms reward this. The posts that spread are the ones that provoke, prod, get people’s backs up, not the ones that explain. A calm conversation about metabolic function or hoof structure will reach a few hundred people if you’re lucky. A post accusing someone of “potentially dangerous misinformation” (thanks to the mainstream equestrian press) will reach thousands. I’m trying to believe it’s not because people prefer conflict, but I fear we doth protest too much on that front.
Once the crowd gathers, it behaves just like any herd under threat. Movement becomes safety. People align themselves with whoever is loudest, most confident, or most in tune with their existing beliefs. Pausing to think before hitting the keyboard isn’t happening. Asking questions can look like betrayal. Pick your side and prepare for battle. The crowd tightens, the social media noise rises, and the original subject almost disappears beneath the weight. It becomes about people. People you like. People you don’t. Information goes out of the window.
Watching the final episode of The Traitors last night (yes, I surprised myself by watching, but it was captivating) there were parallels. A room full of people, all convinced they could read each other perfectly. Everyone sure they knew who was honest and who was playing the game. But those who believed they were reasoning through the game were actually following their emotions. They were looking in the shadows and couldn’t see the light.
It was reality television, but also a perfect study in social psychology. The players were simply being human. Trying to read cues through a warped lens of loyalty but without knowing enough to judge. A fascinating watch and my first ever celebrity anything.
The same thing happens every day online. We think we are assessing facts when really we are reading tone and siding with people. We respond to confidence rather than evidence. We want to belong as much as we want to be right.
We want to feel we are on the side of good. And yet we are often driven more by instinct than awareness.
Think about how similar we are to the animals we train. Horses take their cues from the herd, scanning constantly for danger. If one reacts, the others follow. It keeps them alive in the wild. But online, for us, that same instinct can turn us into something less generous.
And every time it happens, we tell ourselves it was about principle, or accuracy, or science. Often it wasn’t. It was about belonging. About finding your herd.
The outrage runs hard and fast on social media. A week later, everyone moves on. The topic fades, but our trust in each other erodes a little more each time.
Maybe that is what troubles me most. The constant moral certainty leaves no room for learning. It’s easy to condemn and much harder to understand. It is easy to declare allegiance and much harder to stand alone long enough to think.
And this is driven hard by the social media platforms.
The horse world needs nuance. It needs curiosity. It needs the ability to hold conflicting ideas in the same hand and not let panic set in. But that isn’t what drives the algorithm.
I don’t think anyone sets out to be self-righteous. Most of us are simply caught up in the current, swept along by a system designed to make us react rather than reflect. But perhaps we can start to notice when we’re being pulled under. Perhaps we can recognise when we’re moving with the herd rather than thinking for ourselves.
Maybe the best we can do is pause and remember that progress rarely comes from shouting. It comes from thinking, listening, and remaining curious. Taking a moment to think when everyone else is running to the comments section.
