Living under God's (kind of) leadership is a bit like this: ..

Horse sense for people*...

I read a story about Monty Roberts, one of those first "horse whisperers", who loved horses and happened to also have very few cones in his eyes. This apparently meant that he had many more rods in his eyes and could see much better in low lighted conditions, like at night, with only moonlight.

His father worked as a horse-breaker, where Monty saw horses being broken by the methods that were current at that time. He also saw a lot of horses; in fact his father gave him a couple of "unbroken" horses as a present. Because of his dislike of the power/fear-based traditional methods of “breaking in” horses, as well as his liking of horses, he stumbled on to a few aspects of “horse communication” and quickly gained these unbroken horses’ trust.  So he did in less than a day or two, what might take a week or more by traditional methods.

This was so exciting to him that he showed his father, who saw this as obviously not normal and attributed it to some evil witchcraft. He whipped his son with a chain to scare him away from it and make sure he never did it again.

The father’s action though, because it came from a completely different world-view to his son’s, didn't have the desired effect on him. His son left home and camped out with wild horses for a month or more and there at night, he noticed more and more, (thanks to his special-ised sight) and there he put together his understanding of horses' mentality, motivation, and communication. This helped him to develop his method of horse training, and thus to be able to teach others to train them too. He was using “horse language/culture” to “gentle” horses, instead of “breaking them in”.

He spent time giving horses the dignity of being a creature that was hard-wired and nurtured to have a specific culture, language and set of motivations. When he spent the time and focus on acknowledging and learning that language, culture and set of motivations it helped him to form a relationship, & develop that culture and communication further, & things began to change amazingly.

My brother tells me that he saw this kind of horsemanship in Brisbane some years ago. In less than 3 hours an untrained, unridden horse was “gentled” enough for the trainer to be able to put a saddle blanket,  and saddle on the horse, and get on the horse and ride it, steering, and starting and stopping. A partnership that took 13 days to achieve by Monty's father's methods of “breaking”.

I’m not a real horsey person, and I might be wrong in this, but it appears to me that Monty found an alternative to  ignoring the nuances involved in culture, motivation and communication specific to these different creatures (which inevitably sees the interaction between these two different species of creature as a mechanistic  power struggle). His approach allowed for another richer kind of “leadership relationship” to emerge, one where the human played the part, not of a predator, but the part of a leading horse, or maybe it's where the horse plays the part, not of  a machine, but of a fellow creature.

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*  This story is a bit back to front, but if there was a more intelligent race of creatures than us... what kind of motivation and method of interacting with us would we like them to adopt? Or can we not even bear the thought of such a thing happening, in case they act like we have acted to creatures under us? How much sillier would we be to insist on seeing the world and our interactions with more intelligent, powerful creatures through that old cracked lens of power alone, which doesn't acknowledge motivation, culture, and communication options.

I'm glad that Monty Roberts and others like him all over the world did the work of watching, learning, relating and then letting others get involved too. If horses could understand this story, I “betcha” they would be glad too!

 Further footnote, background material, for those interested...

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