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Alpha is a Misnomer · Relatively Stable

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Alpha is a misnomer on horses, wolves, the Cold War, and our need to know who is in charge.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: People often assume when they visit us for the first time that owning
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: the farm means I'm naturally the person they should be taking lessons from.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: At one time, that was true.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: But as I trudge more and more along the path of becoming a better leader,
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've gained valuable insight into what it means to assemble a team.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wear a lot of hats.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm our bookkeeper, our janitor, our grounds crew.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: You may normally view me wearing the same old dusty straw hat,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: sweat-stained and slightly mildewed.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if my hair will actually have a chance to dry now that we're moving
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: into the slanting light of autumn but I'm usually burning my candle at both ends.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: One of our team members may be better poised to give you their full attention.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not always the best person for the job Coaching and groundwork are my passions.
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  SPEAKER_00: I might have been up all night tending to a horse,
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  SPEAKER_00: but I'm ready to meet you first thing if you have a coaching or a respite session
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: with me in the morning.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some of our staff members specialize in dressage.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Others are obsessed with Western.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Some are great with kids and others love teaching adults.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: We all have our things.
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  SPEAKER_00: Our curiosity energizes us.
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  SPEAKER_00: The key is figuring out who is the best person for the job at hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: Horses do this too,
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  SPEAKER_00: and we have a lot to learn from them as we migrate away from outdated ideas
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  SPEAKER_00: about leadership,
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: particularly the notion that every group needs a single leader firmly planted at
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: the top.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Bentley has a very distinct Winnie.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's big and beefy, part Clydesdale, part Thoroughbred.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he came into my life at the turn of the millennium when he was shipped down
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  SPEAKER_00: from Canada to find a home after being born as a byproduct of
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: the human hormone replacement drug, Premarin.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: He started out as the ugliest foal I'd ever seen,
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  SPEAKER_00: but grew into a gorgeous creature with a kind,
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  SPEAKER_00: smart expression and And a black glossy coat.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's an oil painting of him hanging on a wall in a parlor in Europe.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Bentley has supermodel energy.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You feel his aura before you notice his stature in the field.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Most of Bentley's life, he lived in small groups of mares and geldings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Watching him interact with the others, he's been called many things.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bossy, aggressive, bold, in charge, dominant.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: As we settled into the new farm last year,
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  SPEAKER_00: those smaller groups were absorbed into a larger herd that lives together 24-7.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: This new way of living for the horses erased their high energy associated with going
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: in and out of the stall in the barn each day.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Their food became constant and free choice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their dynamics with each other seldom fluctuated.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And there was no longer a need for big energy spikes as everyone vied for resources.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, the horses were freed to create their own daily rhythms and patterns.
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  SPEAKER_00: Naturally, I assumed that Bentley would become the dominant horse in his field.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you didn't know any better,
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: you'd think the same thing,
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  SPEAKER_00: watching Bentley nudge the other horses into line,
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  SPEAKER_00: perking up like a stallion if a mare walked past the fence,
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  SPEAKER_00: being the first in line for a snack.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Bentley's behavior in the field made me worry that my old buddy Max,
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: 32 years young and my partner in this work since I quit my real jobs and ran
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: to horses at the turn of the millennium, was not long for this world.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Bentley was obsessed with Max.
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  SPEAKER_00: He followed Max everywhere in the field,
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  SPEAKER_00: guarding his rear and keeping the other horses away from him.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bentley scrutinized anything that contained Max's scent,
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  SPEAKER_00: a halter or my hands after I'd run them over Max's red shiny coat.
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  SPEAKER_00: One or two times over the years,
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  SPEAKER_00: Bentley seemed to forecast a sick horse reaching their end
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  SPEAKER_00: before there were any outward signs of disease.
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  SPEAKER_00: He became aggressive and fixated, pinning his ears and trying to attack the horses.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I read his fascination with Max as him fortune-telling my fears.
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  SPEAKER_00: I took solace in knowing that at the very least,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Max was living out his days in a true, comfortable, permanent home.
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  SPEAKER_00: This farm and my entire adult life would not have been possible without him.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was wrong.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: As the months went by, I watched Bentley stand as a sentry by the gate.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Waiting for Max to return from the barn where he spends his days under the fans
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  SPEAKER_00: and we cater to him with meals, treats, and general lovins.
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  SPEAKER_00: Max still works.
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  SPEAKER_00: He teaches kids how to steer and trot.
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  SPEAKER_00: He takes his job very seriously and is great at it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bentley would greet his return with low waffles and sighs of relief.
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  SPEAKER_00: He would take his position behind Max's rump and follow him back into the field
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  SPEAKER_00: where the other herd members grazed.
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  SPEAKER_00: During an ice storm last winter,
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  SPEAKER_00: I chose to feed Max a meal in the field instead of risking a long walk
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  SPEAKER_00: across slick ground to the barn.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bentley stood behind Max,
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  SPEAKER_00: keeping watch,
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  SPEAKER_00: warning the other horses away from Max's bowl,
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  SPEAKER_00: and not once attempting to take Max's food.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: As the season shifted towards summer and long days were punctuated
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  SPEAKER_00: by afternoon storms,
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  SPEAKER_00: I watched Max take the lead,
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  SPEAKER_00: guiding the herd from the shelter to the grass and back again as bands of rain wove
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  SPEAKER_00: through the mist.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Max is wise and seasoned.
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  SPEAKER_00: He has lived with small and big herds.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's awesome with new horses, showing them the ropes and ignoring their big emotions.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: The longer I watched the herd build a strong unit,
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: the more I saw Bentley defer to Max's judgment over and over again.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So when Christopher and I were stealing midnight moments outside when he came home
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  SPEAKER_00: from work last week,
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  SPEAKER_00: meaning watching cat videos that I'd saved for him throughout the day,
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'd already started realizing that Bentley wasn't top dog.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: We heard his distinctive, squealing, high-pitched whinny call out from the field.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first time, we ignored it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second time,
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  SPEAKER_00: we stopped and acknowledged that it was weird to hear him calling out in the night.
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  SPEAKER_00: The third time, we went into motion and made our way quickly to the field immediately.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: The boys were all calm and grazing, all together in a clump near the graveyard.
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  SPEAKER_00: We walked alongside them and watched their motions.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Friday positioned himself behind Max, trying to catch some good gnat whisking from Max's tail.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bentley moved like a wedge, untangling Friday from Max's rump.
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  SPEAKER_00: He did this several times.
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  SPEAKER_00: Occasionally,
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  SPEAKER_00: Max would stop grazing and stand still as a statue,
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  SPEAKER_00: his ears perked towards the dark horizon.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: He studied something out there that we couldn't see.
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  SPEAKER_00: Beyond the oaks and the old fence posts,
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  SPEAKER_00: Max noticed a threat and studied it casually,
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  SPEAKER_00: trying to figure out if there would be a problem.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And Bentley's job was to keep Friday from sticking his nose up Max's butt
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  SPEAKER_00: So Max had all his resources available to gain entail.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: They each had a task.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about Friday.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's glorious, but also oblivious.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's learning slowly how to horse,
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  SPEAKER_00: but most of the time he encounters the world as a human would.
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  SPEAKER_00: Short-sighted, flimsy, and frustrated at the flies.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: As Christopher and I walked alongside them,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: just studying their movements and assuring ourselves that their concerns had passed,
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  SPEAKER_00: I realized more and more that the leadership position I had always assigned
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  SPEAKER_00: to Bentley masked the nurturing care of a worried mother figure.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'd read his concern as dominance, when in fact it was insecurity.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And dang, don't we do that all the time with the humans we encounter?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: With their shiny bravado and big presents?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Each week, I'll be adding a little gift section for my paid subscribers.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: The essay picks up for all readers after this break, so keep scrolling.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if you'd like to support the farm and the horses and get a little peek behind
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: the scenes of our daily life,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Go back to the main essay and click the link and help us steward this land and
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: the domesticated and wild creatures who live here.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have links to all of this in the show notes.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you normally listen to us from a podcast platform or from the voiceover of
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: the original essay,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: just make sure you're clicking somewhere in the middle of the original post
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: and you will have access if you're a paid subscriber to a tiny gift each week behind
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: the scenes.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Psych!
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: In 1970, L.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: David Meck published the hugely influential The Wolf,
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.
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  SPEAKER_00: From that book,
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  SPEAKER_00: one term escaped the confines of wolf biology and made its way deep
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  SPEAKER_00: into our collective vocabulary.
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  SPEAKER_00: Alpha, Alpha.
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  SPEAKER_00: Alpha Wolf became an explanation for how we believe social animals organize themselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone rose to the top, someone was in charge, and everyone else fell into place beneath them.
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  SPEAKER_00: We structured society around this framework.
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  SPEAKER_00: We applied it to home, to work, and to so many other human organizational structures.
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  SPEAKER_00: But after he published his book,
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Meck kept watching the wolves and noticed that the behavior
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  SPEAKER_00: of wild wolves was very different from
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  SPEAKER_00: the highly emotional resource-guarding behavior seen in captivity.
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  SPEAKER_00: His original work included wild wolves,
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  SPEAKER_00: but some of the scientific framework available
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  SPEAKER_00: to interpret what he was seeing had been built from earlier studies
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  SPEAKER_00: of captive wolves living in artificial groups.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Over the next 30 years after publication of his book,
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  SPEAKER_00: Mett continued studying wolves in the wild and gained better opportunities
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  SPEAKER_00: to observe how natural packs actually functioned.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then he did something very few people do after producing the scientific equivalent
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  SPEAKER_00: of a hit record.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: He admitted that he had been wrong and set about correcting his earlier conclusions.
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  SPEAKER_00: But by then, Alpha had already escaped the zoo.
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  SPEAKER_00: Humans had taken the term and run with it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And most of us weren't interested in reading the revised memo.
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  SPEAKER_00: Alpha fit too neatly into the story we told about ourselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: It gave scientific cover to a world organized around strength,
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  SPEAKER_00: rank, competition, and the conviction that somebody had to come out on top.
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  SPEAKER_00: We weren't about to give up being top dog simply because
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  SPEAKER_00: the wolves had never been playing the game beside us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone has to be in charge.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 1970s and 1980s were an ideal era to coin the term alpha because
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  SPEAKER_00: the world was structured around dominance theory.
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  SPEAKER_00: The United States and the Soviet Union were at the top of the food chain,
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  SPEAKER_00: each spying on the other to exploit a moment of weakness.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: During the Cold War,
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: nuclear weapons existed in sufficient numbers to destroy civilization many times
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  SPEAKER_00: over,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the powers behind the scenes,
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  SPEAKER_00: keeping everyone alive, were built upon dominance and deterrence.
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  SPEAKER_00: You won't attack me because I can hurt you worse.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a time of fallout shelters and hostage situations.
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  SPEAKER_00: Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan while American
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: and Soviet submarines carried nuclear missiles invisibly beneath the oceans.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1983, audiences watched the day after while imagining nuclear war arriving in Kansas.
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  SPEAKER_00: Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire as he announced
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  SPEAKER_00: the Strategic Defense Initiative and presided over an enormous military buildup.
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  SPEAKER_00: Outward strength was presented as the thing standing between ordinary life and annihilation.
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  SPEAKER_00: We use language such as superpower,
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  SPEAKER_00: superiority, deterrence, escalation, submission, containment, command, and control.
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  SPEAKER_00: There were two sides and somebody had to win.
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  SPEAKER_00: Weakness meant death.
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  SPEAKER_00: We didn't allow the other guy to gain ground.
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  SPEAKER_00: We maintained control.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: In daily life, our institutions function the same way.
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  SPEAKER_00: Corporations had presidents at the top and workers at the bottom.
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  SPEAKER_00: The military had a chain of command.
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  SPEAKER_00: Schools had principals.
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  SPEAKER_00: Families were still emerging from generations in which the father was presumed to be
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  SPEAKER_00: the head of the household.
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  SPEAKER_00: Success meant climbing the ladder and authority flowed downward.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even popular entertainment gave us an endless succession of men proving themselves
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  SPEAKER_00: through toughness.
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  SPEAKER_00: Rocky, Rambo, Top Gun...
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Ronald Reagan himself cultivated the image of the American cowboy,
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  SPEAKER_00: riding horseback on his ranch with his boots and bravado,
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  SPEAKER_00: while promising everyone that America was on the path to becoming strong
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  SPEAKER_00: and confident again.
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  SPEAKER_00: This structure stood on the belief that someone had to be in charge,
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  SPEAKER_00: so naturally we applied this to the wolves we watched in captivity.
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  SPEAKER_00: We hadn't begun questioning the nuances of power in environments.
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  SPEAKER_00: When life told us that someone had to be in charge,
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  SPEAKER_00: it wasn't a stretch to believe the wolves lived this way too.
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  SPEAKER_00: Alpha was at the top and beneath him were progressively subordinate animals.
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  SPEAKER_00: The clear lines of rank maintained order while strength established positions.
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  SPEAKER_00: Challenge threatened position.
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  SPEAKER_00: The successful leader controlled the group.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: We looked into nature and saw the Cold War looking back at us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ronald
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Reagan didn't convince Americans to dominate their horses.
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  SPEAKER_00: Instead,
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  SPEAKER_00: this horse cultural phenomenon called natural horsemanship hit the scene right smack
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  SPEAKER_00: in the middle of the Cold War.
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  SPEAKER_00: Coinciding with the moment that we came to believe that wolves had an alpha leading their pack.
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  SPEAKER_00: We were exquisitely prepared to believe our problems
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  SPEAKER_00: with any species would be solved if we worked on becoming a better,
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  SPEAKER_00: stronger, more dominant leader.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think Pat Pirelli is a world-class dork.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: He hit the horse scene with his branding and in-chargeness.
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  SPEAKER_00: At the time when I was busy running away from human hierarchies
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  SPEAKER_00: that sheltered abuses and the great pyramid scheme of the churches I was raised in.
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  SPEAKER_00: The last thing I wanted was some dude telling me that playing games
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  SPEAKER_00: with my horses would make me their chosen leader.
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  SPEAKER_00: I also hate board games and group fun.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm the kid with no siblings that you'll find sitting in the corner as I keep score
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  SPEAKER_00: with my notebook.
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  SPEAKER_00: What I will give Pat Pirelli is that he coined the term natural horsemanship.
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  SPEAKER_00: He put his logo on centuries of practical skills,
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  SPEAKER_00: pulling them out of context and condensing them down for the average horse owner
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: who didn't have enough time in the day nor the experience to quell their fears
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  SPEAKER_00: through experimentation and patience.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pirelli was a hit with middle-aged horse owners.
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  SPEAKER_00: I am now a middle-aged horse owner.
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  SPEAKER_00: I get it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pirelli became the charismatic face of natural horsemanship,
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  SPEAKER_00: while he and his wife and business partner Linda transformed it into
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: an international phenomenon.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's telling that after their marriage
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  SPEAKER_00: and partnership unraveled three decades later,
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  SPEAKER_00: Linda walked away from the empire they had built and began developing
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: a new approach centered on connection, psychology, and the horse's happiness.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: But let's talk about how Pat Pirelli inherited the framework for his empire.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Natural horsemanship didn't begin with Pat Pirelli in 1980.
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  SPEAKER_00: Its modern American roots trace back to Tom and Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt,
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  SPEAKER_00: Western horsemen who had been traveling around giving clinics to the likes
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  SPEAKER_00: of Pirelli for a long time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before Dorrance and Hunt,
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  SPEAKER_00: the seeds of natural horsemanship had been deposited in America by settlers
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  SPEAKER_00: from Spain and Portugal.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Before them, the information traveled through cavalries in Europe.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Before them,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Romans turned dominance into an art form and brutalized their warhorses
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  SPEAKER_00: into submission.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Before the Romans, the Greeks worked to gain understanding of human and animal nature.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before the Greeks,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Sumerians codified horsemanship lessons that bear a strong resemblance to
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  SPEAKER_00: the slower art of noticing that we're returning to today.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance traveled around teaching riders how to pay attention
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  SPEAKER_00: to the horse in the 1970s and 80s,
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  SPEAKER_00: We were finally beginning to challenge the hard traditions we had inherited.
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  SPEAKER_00: We were ready to begin paying attention again thousands of years later
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  SPEAKER_00: to hazy things like feel, timing,
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  SPEAKER_00: balance,
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  SPEAKER_00: pressure,
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  SPEAKER_00: release,
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  SPEAKER_00: and what the horse was trying to tell us before we became so busy trying to tell
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  SPEAKER_00: the horse what to do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pat Pirelli developed his program in 1982 and began teaching clinics in 1984.
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  SPEAKER_00: He dates coining the term natural horsemanship to 1991.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: In time,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: he organized the elusive concepts such as feel and communication into games, levels,
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  SPEAKER_00: exercises,
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  SPEAKER_00: specialized equipment,
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  SPEAKER_00: and a system packaged for horse owners to take home and practice.
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  SPEAKER_00: Other clinicians followed their own variations,
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  SPEAKER_00: and natural horsemanship stopped being one man's idea and became
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  SPEAKER_00: an entire movement built around the appealing promise that we could learn to speak
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: the horse's own language rather than keep trying to force the horse to speak ours.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was in many ways a tremendous improvement in how ordinary people thought about horses.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: But somewhere between the old horsemen asking us to pay closer attention and
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: an industry trying to explain exactly why these new methods worked,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: the language of partnership became tangled up with the language of hierarchy.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: By the time natural horsemanship became systematized and commercially enormous in
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: the 1980s and 90s,
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  SPEAKER_00: phrases like establish leadership,
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  SPEAKER_00: control his feet,
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  SPEAKER_00: don't let him win,
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  SPEAKER_00: make him respect your space,
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: and become the leader your horse needs didn't require a radical new understanding
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: of social relationships.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: That sounded like the world we already knew.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: almost absurdly,
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: while horse people were learning to become the Alpha, the actual Cold War ended.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: The neat two-superpower map we'd spent decades believing was simply the way
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: the world worked vanished almost overnight.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: The wolves hadn't changed.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: The horses hadn't changed.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Our world had.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: But ideas don't disappear just because the world that made them intuitive has moved on.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they become the most powerful after we've forgotten where they come from.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in the horse world, Alpha was about to have one hell of a second act.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which is crazy because the whole point of the movement was to teach people how
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: to pay closer attention to what was in front of them.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: The radical idea behind natural horsemanship,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: the revolution that began before marketing took over,
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: was that humans needed to stop assuming horses were trying
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: to be deliberately difficult.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: If we stepped back and looked at the horse objectively,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: we might realize that we were the ones who needed to change.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: What happened instead was that we became so certain
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: that we understood what horses were telling us that we stopped asking them
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: to show us anything.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: If we're the natural born leaders, everyone else just needs to get in line.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: If we're the dominant species,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: there is no longer any need to follow the evidence and search for a better answer.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Justice for Julian.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Julian, like Pat Pirelli, is a world-class dork.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's a chestnut gelding that spends his days in the girl's pasture by the barn.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: If there is trouble, this horse will find it.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: I blame him for everything that goes wrong, and most of the time, I am right.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: However, I'm still apologizing to him for what happened the other week.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let me explain.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: No matter how many notes I place on a whiteboard,
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: if I walk away from the barn for an hour, horses end up in weird spots.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've reseeded a portion of the girl's field,
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: and the lush grass is taped off from a sacrifice area where they eat their hay in
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: the evening.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Technically,
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Julian and his harem of two bay mares are given access to the greenery for
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: the better part of the day.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: But on this particular day, Moose,
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: who absolutely does not need lush grass,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: and Pepper,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Moose's accomplice,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: were turned out with Julian and his ladies when I wasn't looking.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: The field was crowded.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: The mares were coming into season.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Tensions were high.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: I heard a lot of hollering in the vicinity of their field, so I went down to investigate.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: What I found was Pepper dripping with sweat,
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Julian baring his teeth and what appeared to be Julian charging
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: and attacking Pepper.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Over the course of the next hour,
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: I threatened to inflict bodily harm on Julian in a lot of creative ways as I tried
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: to herd him away from the gate and give a clear path for Pepper to escape back into
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: the safety of the loafing area.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: I rude the day Julian was born and I was mad that I'd made a big push
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: to confiscate him in the battlefield of my divorce from my ex-husband who wanted
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: to keep him.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I doubted my entire career path and at one point stopped intervening entirely so
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: that nature could take its course.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the most anticlimactic way,
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Julian backed off and I was able to get a halter on Pepper.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I led her to the barn for the night so she could have a peaceful place to rest and recover.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oddly, she didn't settle down when I placed her in the stall.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: She paced and called out for the other horses.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Julian was fine.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was calm and happy and just munched hay like nothing had happened.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, I took Pepper back out to her field.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: She began immediately calling out.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: She pulled against the lead rope in my hand, trying to get to Julian.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Julian saw her coming and snuck behind the Mountain of Moose,
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: the big bay mare, hoping that Pepper couldn't see him.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: He literally was hiding.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then it all made sense to me.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Julian hadn't been attacking Pepper the night before.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was trying to tell her no.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And Pepper, with her hormones flaring, had not taken his no for an answer.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: The whole time Julian was the victim,
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: but I was so determined in my foundational belief of male dominance
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: and female obedience that I couldn't see the truth of the encounter
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: through my projections.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is no set hierarchy in the field.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: The horses trade roles depending on what is happening and who has the best idea at the moment.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: Their motivations, trust, and environment are the deciding factors.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And here we are walking up with our flags and sticks,
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: waving our hands about and expecting full compliance.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: If I had stood back and observed what was happening in the field before rushing in
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: to demand a solution, the evidence would have led me to a better outcome.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Humans are odd little creatures.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Revising the story.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: And horses trade roles within their hierarchies.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Put a pile of delicious hay into a field and watch who is willing to move
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: the other out of the way to get it.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers call these dominance relationships, and the title is pretty accurate.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows what we'll discover in the future?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Where we've erred is mistaking dominance for leaderships.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: The horse who gets the first choice of hay isn't always the horse the herd trusts
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: when it's time to move in the field.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: The horse pushing all the others away from the gate may miss the fact
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: that something dangerous has happened along the fence line.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers studying collective movement in horses have found
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: that leadership is distributed among the group.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: With different horses initiating movements at different times rather than
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: a single designated leader making all the calls.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the horses have figured all this out without attending a single leadership seminar.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: In the case of Bentley calling out in the night and Julian aggressively calling
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: the shots with Pepper, I misunderstood what I was experiencing.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: I made assumptions based on my limited understanding.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I knew what was happening, but in both cases I was wrong.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: I followed the wrong leader.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: Bentley was playing wingman to the dude in command,
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: and Pepper wasn't trying to get away from Julian.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: She pursued him.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a male aggressor and a subservient female,
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: and my job as the human was to step in and save them all.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, I had a chance to see what was happening with Pepper.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: I took it all in better because my emotions weren't high and
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: the horses were relatively settled.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Pepper pulled against the lead rope
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: while my tired alpha gelding hid his entire chestnut self behind moose.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: David Meck had wolves on Ellesmere Island.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: I had Julian hiding behind a mare.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: The scale of our scientific contributions differs somewhat, but the problem was the same.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: We had looked at an animal,
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: interpreted what we saw through a framework we already believed,
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: and then been given new information that made the old explanation pointless.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Mech changed his mind.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: I owe Julian an apology.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that is the piece of all of this that matters more to me than
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: whether we continue using the word alpha,
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: whether natural horsemanship survives another generation,
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: or whether somebody somewhere is still spending a Saturday afternoon moving
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: a horse's feet around a round pen to establish leadership.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: We will always bring ourselves into the pasture.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: We bring our childhoods and our politics and our marriages and our churches and our workplaces.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: We bring whatever we were taught at a clinic in 1994.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: We bring the books we read,
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: the trainers we admire,
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: and the things that worked once and therefore became truth forever.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: We bring every hierarchy we have ever survived and everyone we have benefited from.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then we stand at the fence looking at another species while convincing ourselves
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: that we're simply observing nature.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: We aren't.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: We are observing ourselves through nature.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make observation useless, but it does make curiosity essential.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: The answer isn't to replace the old alpha pyramid with another absolute proclamation
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: that horses don't have dominance or hierarchy because
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: that wouldn't be paying attention either.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Horses move one another.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: They compete.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: They have preferences and alliances and grudges and friendships.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them can be spectacular assholes about hay.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Julian remains a world-class dork,
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: and I reserve the right to blame him for whatever happens tomorrow.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: But 26 years after I quit my real jobs to become a professional horse person,
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: I am becoming considerably less interested in deciding who is in charge.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know who knows something.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know who is being followed and why.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know who is frightened,
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: who is curious,
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: who needs space,
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: who wants company, who notices something the rest of us have missed.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is the horse standing in front of me actually fitting
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: the story I have been giving him in my mind?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be able to change the story to see new details and to never stop looking.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Natural horsemanship, as it was presented in its early days, gave us a simple template.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Pay attention to the horse.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Julian, world-class dork that he is, is still trying to teach me how.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Love, Kim.