The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another. â¦
âdavid whyte
I shall begin with an oft-told story. I approached my oldest sonâs first grade class field trip to our ranch to meet and visit with the horses on âfarm dayâ with no little trepidation. It had seemed like a good idea when I had volunteered, but the morning they were to arrive the logistics of keeping track of 30 wiggly, distractible six-year-olds amidst the barns and paddocks that held 12 horses of various ages and temperaments started to seem a bit overwhelming. Could I keep them interested in the mini-lecture their teacher had requested of me? The horses were all used to my sons running around and under them, so I knew none of the horses would intentionally harm a little human. But would one of the children slip out of sight and through a fence, to be inadvertently stepped on?
I should not have worried about trying to keep order; that was not to happen. As the children descended the school bus steps my stallion, Clipper, stuck his head out of his paddock stall window to see what was going on. My son, Nick, noticed this and ran over to say hello to his equine friend, and the children all excitedly followed. In what resulted, I was able to witness and photograph an astonishing example of trans-species communicationâa call and response of intentionality, a collaboration of meaning initiated and enacted by the various parties involved. It went simply like this: The children wanted to pet Clipper,
Sunspotâs Eclipse (Clipper) and the first graders. Photo by author.
In what follows I would like to unpack this interaction, not as an anecdote that proves something on its face, but rather as an encounter that caused me to dig deeper into its explaining. I seek here to query how this sharing of meanings was possible. To do this prompts other questions: What are the communicative proficiencies of horses, and how might they use these abilities to attempt to communicate with humans? What might horses think of humans? What are the implications of interspecies communication for power relations between members of the two species? What might the answers to these questions signify for human-horse relationships, more broadly?
To answer these questions requires navigating crisscrossed trails through quite a few disciplinary informational ecosystems. This is because equine scholars as yet have no single, solidifying theory or method to apply to interspecies communication. Therefore, I have two goals with this project: first, to provide some suggested theory and method through which to explore this and other instances of trans-species communication and, second, to consider the outcomes for horses of such communication through a case study focusing on the concept of interpersonal attunement.
1
Scholars have devoted a great deal of social scientific attention to the human-horse interface over the last decade, applying various theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary protocols to their endeavors. My concern here is specifically with those who have discussed the act of human-equine communication (e.g., Argent, 2012; Blokhuis & Lundgren, 2017; Brandt, 2004; Dashper, 2016, 2017; Evans & Franklin, 2010; Ford, 2019; Game, 2001; Maurstad, Davis & Cowles 2013; Savvides, 2012). As a result of the anthropocentric beginnings of the social sciences, a still-lingering tradition, some of these studies have focused primarily upon how humans perceive horses, and valuably highlight those human perspectives. Other studies have approached the topic from the perspective of embodiment. Of course, the focus on materiality and embodimentâon understanding the horse within the context of the bodily exchange of knowledgeâis one realm through which human-horse relationships can be fruitfully explored. However, this approach sometimes is justified by contentions that we should not attempt to access the equine mind because âexperiencing the world from someone elseâs perspective might be unachievable (if not misguided or even arrogant)â (Birke and Thompson, 2019, p. 31). Unfortunately, accepting this assertion has the outcome of releasing researchers from the duty to endeavor to question horsesâ subjective experience and interests from the standpoint of the horse. This has the result of marginalizing those experiences and interests. It also functionally reinforces the hoary Cartesian notion that horses/other animals do not have minds or intelligence, even if that is not the intention.
It is important to acquire a better understanding of how agents from different species, having cognitive and, particularly, communicational skills that are in the main far from being superimposable, can cooperate with each other [and] also determine the modalities to use. The question of interspecific communication thus turns out to be crucial. â¦
The active field of applied ethology, often termed âvetmedâ studies because many take place within schools of veterinary medicine, studies the behavior of domesticated horses, rather than assessing the behavior of wild or feral horses as do conventional equine ethologists. Applied ethologists often rely on training horses through classical conditioning (now reframed as âlearning theoryâ) in order to test their capacities, and the quantitative analysis of such data. These studies provide a great deal of information about equine cognitive abilities, and social and communicative behaviors. However, the requirements of scientific methodology preclude researchers from exceeding the findings of their studies to consider the implications of their results, something I shall endeavor here.
Shared meaning is not the property of individuals, nor is it transmitted from one to the other; rather, it is pooled between them. The center of two separate beings, the link, becomes their communication. Are they two beings any more? Yes and no. Yes, they remain separate and unique. No, their communication has, in a sense, made them one functioning unit, a system of interdependencies.
anderson & ross, 2001, p. 56
Communication is rhetorical when the message sender has the goal of realizing purposes through creating shared meanings. Rhetoric is studied as its own field, and within the fields of communications studies, comparative literature, and English. It is at once the technique, art, and study of communicating persuasively to convince or influence. Within communication, a rhetorical act is understood as âan intentional, created, polished attempt to overcome the obstacles in a given situation with a specific audience on a given issue to achieve a particular endâ (Campbell, 1982, p. 7).
Language is the means through which communication, and thus meanings, are transmitted, and ends are attempted to be achieved. Key to our purposes here, language includes both verbal and nonverbal elements. We could as easily arrive at the same result, for instance, if I asked you to come sit beside me as we would by me catching your eye, patting the sofa beside where I sit, turning my palm upwards, and curling my index finger. Either would be a rhetorical actâa point in time where communication occurred in which meanings and persuasive intent were shared. Our linguicentric bias wrongly assumes that nonverbal communication is a lesser form of communication. It is not.
Long studied as a solely human endeavor, rhetorician George Kennedy (1992) opened discourse regarding comparative rhetorical studies that included animal communication. As posed by Kennedy âthe rhetorical study of animal communication primarily seeks to identify basic principles and formal aspects of communication that are fundamental to all rhetorical structures and used by both human and nonhuman animalsâ (1998, p. 12). In arguing for a universal rhetoric, Kennedy notes as one example a dogâs understanding of metonymy, as when a leash denotes a walk, and usage of metonymy rhetorically, when bringing a leash to their human companions serves as a suggestion for a walk (Kennedy, 1998, p. 16). More recently, a new generation of rhetoricians have picked up this task, to good measure (e.g., Bjørkdahl & Parrish, 2017; Hawhee, 2020; Parrish, 2018; Seegert, 2016), and Emily Plec (2014) has proposed extending the field of rhetoric to encompass such âinternaturalâ communication.
By offering a look at how we might begin to apply a trans-species communication approach to expand possibilities for human-equine studies, I follow here Plecâs conception of internatural communication. I am further guided by Gail Bradshawâs (2009, 2010) work at developing a trans-species psychology using human psychological models to explore continuities in how social
2 Abilities That Allow Horses to Communicate
I turn now to summarizing recent research in applied ethological studies addressing horsesâ communicative abilities, which allow us to bring horsesâ species-level ways of being in the world into the picture. My purpose is not to critique these studies, to detail the methods used, or to consider the research designs, which are highly creative and worthy of appreciation. For that, I refer readers to the studies themselves. Rather, it is to use these studies as a springboard to informed speculation as to their implications for human-horse relationships.
What allows for the possibility of trans-species communication is that both humans and horses are social animals, animals whose survival and psychological wellbeing are promoted through relationships and bonds within complex social matrices. Where humans and horses share worlds, these matrices can include each other at various levels of scale, from the interpersonal to the social. Like humans, horses can and do bond deeply and reciprocally with members of other species.
Communication is what facilitates the crucial, intraspecific bonds between social animals. Although human and equine communication capabilities vary by the species, personalities, physiologies, cognitive abilities, biographies, beliefs, and willingness of the individuals involved, neurobiologically the systems are analogous and function in similar waysâto build and maintain individual and group relationships that provide for the physical and psychological safety necessary for survival. From a cognitive ethological perspective, these continuities stem from similar neuroevolutionary paths and allow for similar mental and affective processes that can be understood across species.
A further continuity we share with horses deals with faces. Our faces are maps through which we project our own and read othersâ emotions. The study of the nonverbal communication associated with facial movements is known within human communication studies as small-scale kinesics, and is associated with conveying emotional information (for more on equine nonverbal communication, see, Argent 2012). Taking the notion of human faces as emotional maps into the equine realm, horses have been shown to recognize positive
3 What Horses Ask of UsâTrans-species Rhetorical Communication
Horses are not just passive observers of our communications. They also reach out to humans for help when they need assistance. In a study by Malavasi and Huber (2016), experimenters showed horses buckets with treats in them. The handler stood with the horses, and performed one of four actions: Faced toward; faced away; had helpers by the buckets; or walked away from the horse but then returned. The horses had to work through how to communicate to the handler to get the bucket. The researchers found that the horses would use âgaze alteration,â alternating looking at the bucket and then at the handler. If that didnât work, they became more creative, nodding their heads and âpointingâ toward the bucket with them. Furthermore, the horses only performed these actions when the handler was looking at them; they searched for eye contact. If the handler was not looking at the horse they would walk back to the handler and touch her. In other words, horses were aware of, responding to, and changing their strategies based upon whether or not they had the handlerâs attention. The horsesâ rhetorical communication was keyed to the humanâs attentiveness.
In a similar study, Ringhofer and Yamamoto (2016) investigated domestic horsesâ social cognitive skills with humans in a problem-solving situation where food was hidden in a place accessible only to humans. The research design tested horses who watched as a research assistant put a carrot in a food bucket that they could reach, but that was not accessible to the horses. They then tested several conditions. In one instance, the horse witnessed a human caretaker watching the food going into the bucket (the âknowledge state,â in which the horse knows the caretaker knows). In a second condition, the horses witnessed the caretaker not watching as the carrot was placed into the bucket (the âuninformed state,â in which the horse knows the caretaker does not know). The researchers videotaped the horses and compared the responses between the two conditions. In both situations, the horses used visual and tactile signalsâlooking at, touching, or lightly pushing the caretaker. However,
In the final study I shall discuss (Trösch et al., 2020) the researchers explored horsesâ ability to interpret and infer human intentions, using an âunwilling versus unableâ paradigm. Experimenters performed two âunableâ actions in attempting to get a carrot to the horse; presenting as inept by either dropping the carrots or appearing unable to overcome a barrier between the two, but with the intention of trying to help the horse. They also presented one âunwillingâ action, moving the carrot out of reach when the horse attempted to eat it, where the intention was to not allow the horse the treat. Remarkably, the horses reacted differently based on the experimentersâ goals, seeming to surmise their intentions. In the âunableâ scenarios, the horses kept trying to communicate with the experimenters. Important for what follows, in the âunwillingâ situation, the horses simply gave up; they spent more time looking, and even turning, away from the humans.
These studies show that when faced with unsolvable tasks, horses attempt to request their keepersâ assistance, nonverbally. These actions are clearly rhetorical acts, as wereâin the other directionâthose of the first-gradersâ request of Clipper and his affirmative response.
Many often assume that horsesâ cognitive and emotional worlds are cogged with fairly simple machinery, and interact with them based upon this faulty belief. To dispel this assumption, I would like to flag some implications of the studies I have presented:
- âHorses communicate nonverbally in similar ways to us, and through this attend to our emotions;
- âHorses reach out and offer to communicate and engage with us;
- âHorses attempt to compel us, rhetorically;
- âHorses watch us, and through their actions show that they understand what we know and what our intentions are; and
- âHorses perceive us as relevant beings, capable of noticing them, helping them, harming them, or ignoring them.
These instances point to the fallacy of assuming that because nonhumans lack verbal language, they also lack the cognitive ability or communicative means to share meanings or behave in thoughtful, agential, rhetorical ways.
4 Trans-species Attunement and Influence
To bring this around to the issue of power and influence within human-horse relations, philosopher Vinciane Despret has said of human-nonhuman communication: âMeanings are constructed in a constant movement of attunement, which makes them emerge,â and this in itself âredistributes control.â (Despret, 2008, p. 12, emphasis in original). Attunement transpires when one offers awareness, attention, receptivity, and responsiveness to anotherâs emotional state or needsâwhen we listen. Here I would like to think about how such human attunement, or lack thereof, might be seen to redistribute power, and the effects that might have on horses.
Psychologists John and Julie Gottman call offers to communicate âbidsâ (Gottman, 2004). âA bid is any attempt from one partner to another for attention, affirmation, affection, or any other positive connection. Bids show up in simple ways, a smile or wink, and more complex ways, like a request for advice or helpâ (Brittle, 2015). When a bid is offered, the other partner has a choice to connect with their partnerâs bid, or not. Bids may be responded to in three ways: Partners can âturn towardâ (engage and positively respond), âturn awayâ (ignore the bid), or âturn againstâ (engage and respond negatively). Julie Gottman describes the âturning towardâ response as the nuts and bolts that hold relationships together (2004, p. 3). It should be intuitively evident that turning toward facilitates relational satisfaction, but the Gottmans took this further and quantified their results. They found the number of various bid responses predict with good accuracy whether a couple will stay together (more turning toward) or divorce (more turning away or against). In other words, the degree of attunement to one another within a relationship is so important that it in itself can predict whether married couples stay together or not.
This is because bids go beyond the pragmatics of, say, the content of the question, âWill you help me with this?â They include also relational elements that query listenership, attentiveness, and care. That is, the same bid, at the same time, asks relational questions such as: âAre you listening?â âCan I trust you to be there for me?â âDo I matter to you?â These complex nuances lie at the center of most conversations and relationships, and are so powerful that when
As the three studies discussed above show, horses, too, offer bids to humans. In day-to-day interactions, these bids extend beyond asking for carrots, and also can be answered by turning toward, away, or against. For example, we might turn away from the horseâs request, âPlease scratch me hereâ because we are unable to notice the bid. We might notice, but misinterpret, the query, âIâm afraid right now and need your assurance,â turning against the bid by punishing the horse for her fear. We might notice, but be unwilling to answer, the horseâs bid, âMy back hurts so I donât want to be ridden,â and turn against the bid by pushing him to work despite his pain. These hypothetical requests and responses highlight several explanations for why we do not listen and respond to equine requests: Some may believe horsesâ have neither inner worlds nor communicative abilities, points I hope I have dispelled here. Some may be willing to listen, but unskilled at reading the nonverbal messages horses send and thus miss, or misinterpret, their meaning. In the most sinister explanation, some may well recognize horsesâ bids but simply view their own human agenda as overriding the horseâs desires or needs.
Anyone who has watched groups of horses together will recognize they listen to one another and do so as if their lives depend on it, because they do. Social beingsâ very survival hinges upon how attuned others are to them; we, and horses, are mindful of who others are to us and who we are to them. The applied ethological studies summarized above tell us the social equine brain is programmed to see us, and that they eagerly, acutely, and intensely observe us, keying in to our emotions and even intentions. In interactions with humans, horses interpret our behaviors, gauging whether we can help them or, as with Clipper and the children, whether we need help they can provide. If, as I have shown, communication serves similar purposes for social animals, then might horsesâ interpretations of our responses to their bids move beyond the pragmatics of the content dimension of message such that they also consider its relational meaning? Might a part of horsesâ interpretations of us include the appraisal of whether or not we have the ability to see who they are?
5
The studies discussed above show that horses have a concept of what it is to be a capable beingâa being capable of, for instance, understanding where the carrots are and getting themâand that they perceive us as quite competent in the worlds we share. How, then, might they decipher our turning away or against their outreaches to us? Might they be troubled, in their own equine cognitive ways, with interpretations that go something like this: âHumans are competent and communicatively capable; I am communicating capably, yet they seem not to hear me. Why keep trying? I give up.â The result of the âunwilling versus unableâ study (Trösch et al., 2020) in which the horses simply (literally) âturned awayâ from the unwilling carrot providers, ceasing to continue with their bids, would argue that something similar is in action.
The horse knows. He knows the human twenty to one. Itâs amazing how much heâll get out of things, how heâll fill in for as little as the human knows about him. How that horse can handle it has always been a mystery to me. Put yourself in his shoes to live your whole life where no one knows who you really are. ⦠A human couldnât take itâ.
ehrlich, 1998, n.p., my emphasis
One of the most compelling human needs is the desire to be seen and heard, to be known by another. When we are not included we feel outcast, distanced. For humans in prison, the social isolation of solitary confinement causes inmates to become restless, angry, violent, and even suicidal (Gamble and Gamble, 2013, p. 14). Horses kept isolated in stalls respond similarly, developing repetitive stereotypies such as weaving back and forth to attempt to cope with the stress caused by a lack of engagement. I have watched mares ignore unruly foals until they behaved better, operating from a framework similar to human civilizations through history which have shunned those who transgress, understanding that the denial of connection is a potent punishment. Yet unlike those chastised foals, the horses I speak of have not transgressed. Might we now consider the results of our lack of attunement to these cooperative, emotionally intelligent creatures whose hard-wirings flick sparks of connection outward but find no tinder?
Let us return once more to Clipper and the first-graders. Our shared social world consisted of our two families, his and mine, all members known to one other, all with mutually meaningful histories and memories of those histories. Within this interspecies affective community, all persons, human and horse, had their needs considered and bids attuned to. Clipperâs response was not intentionally trained. It was not, as âlearning theoryâ (e.g., McGreevy, 2007) tells us we must do, rewarded with treats when it did, or punished when it did not, occur. It was not coerced. Horses raised and treated in ways that acknowledge with respect and sensitivity their communicative, emotional, and cognitive capabilities, moods, individual natures, and desires do not need to be âtrainedâ to pro-socially answer our bids.
Horses are collectivists, predisposed to be cooperative citizens. Horses already know how to behave interdependently and communally, both within and across species lines. Unless sullied by human actionsâunless their own bids have been consistently ignored or acted againstâthey bring these ways of being to their interactions with humans. I suggest that Clipper responded to the childrenâs bid to lower his head because his bids were regularly answered, where this attunement he received did not train him, but rather allowed him to respond in the spontaneous, reciprocal, pro-social, interdependent manner in which horses answer bids from their own kin and kind.
It has bearing on the matter at hand that this is how friends respond to friends: we listen for their bids and respond affirmatively when they ask
6 Conclusion and ImplicationsâTrans-species Communication and Human-Equine Studies
In this project, I focused on several aspects of language and communication within horse-human relationships. These include the limits of the theory, methods, and assumptions through which scholars frame and describeâor avoid framing and describingâsuch communication. I proposed a suggested means to fill this gap through an interdisciplinary study of trans-species communication by which we might better understand and describe how meanings are shared interspecifically. My proposed model used theory from the fields of rhetoric, communication studies, and psychology to interpret results from applied ethological studies and extend their implications, but these are not the only fields that might be brought to bear on this enterprise.
I applied this approach to a case study analyzing a single instance of trans-species rhetorical communication, considering the characteristics of horses that made the encounter possible. This showed horses as capable, active, engaged trans-species communicators. I also considered the notional negative psychological effects on horses of the lack response to such rhetorical queries. But again, this is merely an example of the type of data that might be analyzed moving forward.
Exploring trans-species communication cannot be accomplished without allowing both sides of the communicative endeavor to be equitably present. I have attempted to take and present the horsesâ perspectiveâI hope persuasively, if speculativelyâby correlating similarities in communicative motives and psychological processes between humans and horses as social animals. My desire here was to âtake the animalâs viewpoint, rather than confer a human
This is to say that we must now move beyond the notion that equineâand more broadly, animalâminds are inaccessible to us, even if we might stumble in doing so. To do this we must cease merely asking, telling and demanding. Rather, we must listen, with all of our senses, with openness, with care, and with humility.
Notes on Contributor
Gala Argent is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work concerns human-nonhuman animal intersections. She holds ba and ma degrees in communication studies, a Ph.D. in archaeology, and teaches or has taught in departments of animal studies, psychology, communication studies, anthropology, and art. Her published work concerns the relationships between humans and other animals and how these might be seen to co-create and replicate mutually interdependent selves, identities, and aspects of culture within various scenarios, past and present.
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