Perpetrating Trauma

A video clip showed up on my facebook wall recently and brought up, once again, the technique known as Laying a Horse Down. I wrote about this topic in an earlier post, but this encounter with the issue sent me on a different mental path.

Probably because I have been working with a horse whose way of being in the world resembles descriptions of humans with post-traumatic stress disorder, I started thinking about how to describe what I believe to be some of the psychological costs of this extreme and wrong-minded technique.

For those of you who haven’t encountered this type of horse “taming,” the basic program is this:

• First, you restrain an animal who is programmed to survive by running away,
• Then you force him to the ground, into a position where even his ability to draw breath is compromised,
• Finally, you lay on top of him to simulate a fatal attack by a predator.

You make this operation sound beneficial by saying it will help the horse get over his fear of you. You say that afterward he will be so thankful that you didn’t actually kill him, he will then trust and respect you.

Maybe a screwed-up Stockholm syndrome version of trust and respect. Isn’t it much more logical to expect this animal to fear you? Loathe you. Dread being in your presence ever again and find some way to prevent it. But trust you? That’s got to be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.

Ever see a baby bunny (or any other small animal) that has been caught by a well-fed cat? Bunny goes limp and plays dead, because if it moves it becomes way more fun for kitty – who isn’t really hungry – to play with. It’s called tonic immobility and it’s hardwired in to prey animals and, incidentally, humans.

If the cat loses interest or some interfering person comes along and convinces it to let the bunny go pretty quickly, the baby might scamper off to safety. But if the cat has been toying with the bunny for some time before the reprieve or rescue, the bunny might stay immobile, as if it can no longer move. As if it has given up and decided it’s already dead. Sometimes, if you find a quiet, safe place to leave these babies alone, they eventually come back to life and when you go back to check on them, they are gone. Other times, you simply find them dead, even if they didn’t have a mark on them. I have always felt that there was some mechanism – some kind of psychic tipping point – in these animals that makes them give up and die even when they are physically unharmed.  And, there is more than one way to die – the physical body can die, but so can the emotional/spiritual body.

There’s a lot of interesting research on the web linking this type of instinctive immobility during a traumatic experience to human psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative behaviors, anxiety disorders and even catatonia. One very interesting blog even linked the chemistry involved in this reflex to chronic pain in humans.

So, what exactly is a person doing to a horse by intentionally forcing the animal into this state? The justifications for perpetrating this kind of primal attack on a horse makes no sense to me, on any level – intellectual or emotional. Everything I know about what happens when a living being’s very survival is threatened tells me this horse, deprived of his first line of defense – flight – will either fight until he is horribly injured or dead or he will just check out mentally and emotionally, dissociating to the point that it’s as if he barely lives in his body anymore. Those vacant-eyed, shutdown horses may seem safe to people are either afraid of horses but won’t admit it or “easy to handle” for those are too lazy to do the work to create a respectful relationship with their horses, but doing that to another living being is a travesty. What, Stepford wives weren’t enough? Now we want Stepford horses?

Make no mistake. Horses who have been induced to check out are neither tamed nor trained. Both of those are processes that take time. Training is a mutual process of teaching and learning. How well would you learn if you were trussed up, forced to the ground and had somebody lay on top of you? (I believe when humans do that kind of thing to each other, it’s called assault!?)  If it’s such a great teaching tool for the early education of a living creature, why aren’t elementary schools the world over simply employing thugs to tie up the students and sit on them while the teacher expounds on the subject of the day? Wouldn’t that produce quiet, respectful students?

What makes me the maddest about the people who promote and defend this type of “training” method is that we know better, each and every one of us human beings. We can’t say that because we are predators, we just don’t directly relate to the instinctual responses of a prey animal. Although our intelligence and ability to design all manner of tools and techniques to maim and kill places us atop the food chain as master predators, don’t forget that we also have in our collective memory the experience of being prey. There are all manner of predators who can take down a human being, so we have that primal knowledge programmed in, as well.

Don’t think so? Just imagine dumping a couple of suburban families off in the Australian outback, the remote Canadian Rockies, the Amazon rain forest or a mid-east desert with no satellite phone, no weapons and no survival training. Are they predators or prey? Or ask anyone who has been physically abused or assaulted by a by another human. Freeze, flight, fight, fright – we’ve got it all in our circuits, too.

I have owned two horses in my life whom I suspected had been thrown as part of their early experiences with humans. Both were hyper-vigilant, dissociative, over-reactive and “hard to handle,” not because that was the underlying personality of either, but because of what had been done to them in the guise of “training.” With years of patience and consistency, they both found their places in the world and learned to exist fairly successfully with people. But the fear and discomfort they had to endure and overcome was entirely unnecessary. So much time and potential gone to waste. Their lives were made much harder and less happy because of a few misguided moments with the wrong people. That’s just wrong.