The Soul of a Horse

by Joe Camp

  The day we loaded Sojourn to move him, the emotions were not as happy, and I’m sure he was reading our mood because he was clearly a bit tense. He walked right into the trailer and I closed the partition. But when I closed the trailer door with no other horses in the trailer, he became seriously fidgety and pawed the floor. As we drove out right past the other horses and his one herd buddy, I could hear him stomping around and calling to his herd mates, which did nothing to settle my nerves, already scrambled from the decision to sell, and from navigating my first trip down the driveway with an actual passenger in the trailer.

  It was less than a fifteen-minute ride, but I was very relieved when we arrived. As I opened the door, Sojourn became more agitated. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. This would be a test of will to keep my adrenaline down. The trailer looked much smaller now than it had in the past. When I opened the partition, it would be just me and that gigantic horse in this tiny little trailer. A gigantic horse who was clearly not very happy about something. I had no idea about what until the partition swung open.

  His front right foot was caught in the hay bag, about chest high.

  He was terrified. He couldn’t get away from it. When the partition swung open, he wanted to bolt, but couldn’t. He was tugging and stomping, and trying to rear enough to get his foot out. Should I run? Get out of harm’s way? Should I try to calm him and get close enough to unsnap the feed bag? That option didn’t seem very intelligent at the moment. I swelled up like Jabba the Hutt, shook the lead rope, and wagged my finger in his face.

  “Back up,” I said, as if he could. “Easy.”

  I was trying to control my own adrenaline. All of this happened so furiously fast that I have no idea how or why I decided to throw caution to the wind in favor of trying to make him focus on a task, get out of the reactive side of his brain, and, hopefully, get calm enough for me to approach his foot and unsnap the feed bag.

  Outside the trailer, Kathleen was frozen in place, afraid to even think of looking inside. She was certain from the stomping she heard that I was being trampled to death. At some level I suppose I had considered that possibility but had decided that I would attempt to rise above it. Do whatever had to be done and do it well enough to make it work. To keep both myself and Sojourn safe from injury. I’d worry about what could’ve happened later.

  Inside, Sojourn’s eyes were as big as saucers. All I could see was white, but he was watching me. He seemed to be listening. Or trying to. Then suddenly the feed bag tore loose and his foot was free. This could be good, or it could be terrible. I shook the lead rope harder, wagging my finger at light speed.

  “Easy. Good boy. Back up. Just a bit. Pay attention to me.”

  My adrenaline wanted to soar, but amazingly didn’t. I could feel the calm, the lid staying on. I knew this was the answer. If I was calm, I had a shot at causing Sojourn to be calm. He was blowing and snorting, his eyes still crazed, but he was standing still, more or less. He was listening to me. I eased toward the door, consciously deciding whether to toss the rope and let him bolt or step in front of him and rely on my ability to keep him calm. Relatively speaking.

  I chose the latter. I stopped him. Backed him up a step, which he accepted. Then I slid in front of him and stepped cleanly out the door and immediately to my right, out of his way. He came right out behind me and loped off to the end of the lead rope. I signaled him to come in rather than walking to him, wanting to keep him focused, thinking. He huffed and puffed and snorted, but walked slowly up to me and I rubbed his forehead.

  “Good boy,” I said. “Very good boy.”

  I had never meant anything more in my life.

  I was so proud of him. And of myself. And of the fact that this event, as traumatic as it was for Sojourn, me, and Kathleen, would forever live as the certain proof that all we believed and all we were doing was right and good. That when a horse has accepted us by his free choice and has assigned us the position of herd member and leader, and when we accept and live up to that position, he will defer. He will subordinate even his worst fears to the trust he has placed in us.

  When Kathleen finally tiptoed up to us, tears were running down my cheeks.

  “Did you see that?” I blubbered.

  “I did.”

  “Did you see how good he was?”

  “I did.”

  She rubbed him on the forehead.

  “I can’t leave him here,” I said.

  “You also can’t do it all,” she said. “And he wants it all.”

  She let that sink in for a moment.

  “Our decision is a good one,” she said. “He needs a full-time leader. You’ve done an amazing job with him, and he has taught you that the sky is truly the limit when you walk in the horses’ footsteps, when they make the choice, and when you fulfill their need for trust and leadership. He proved the truth of that today in spades, and we can love him for it. But remember, part of loving, the hard part, is making sure that he has what he needs. Sojourn needs someone else. And our other horses need you.”

  It was a quiet ride home. For once I wasn’t thinking about the big trailer that was following us.

  “It’s interesting,” I said, “how a single thought or event can feel both good and bad, can cause hurt and yet empower.”

  “Yes it is,” Kathleen said. “It is indeed.”

  Neither of us spoke again. We were thinking about Sojourn. And the legacy he had left us.

  We now knew it was all for real. It was all true.

  Good boy, Sojourn.

  24

  The Big Round Circus Ball

  When I first walked Cash down to the arena to look at this new object, he stopped cold in his tracks and just gaped at it.

  There was nothing in his memory banks that looked like this.

  Then a breeze wafted by and the darn thing moved.

  Omigod, it’s alive!

  The next thing I knew Cash was at the other end of the arena, huffing and puffing. No idea how he got there. Seriously. None.

  “It’s just a circus ball,” I hollered.

  The look he gave me spoke volumes. But this circus ball and Cash would soon change my mind about a lot of things I needed to relearn.

  IMAGINE AN INDOOR arena. Twelve thousand wildly screaming fans, there to see the season opener of a brand-new professional arena football league. Music blaring. Drums pounding. Feet stomping. Spotlights undulating.

  The perfect atmosphere for a horse, right?

  I cannot imagine taking one of ours into that fray. And yet Hasan, a majestic gray Arabian stallion, would gallop down a smoke-filled tunnel and out into this chaos, running right through a large rubber blow-up football helmet. The racket would escalate. Fireworks would explode into light and thunder as Hasan galloped around the arena. He would then rear and execute a hind-leg walk with his front legs landing perfectly on a pedestal upon which he would pivot in a complete circle, saluting all the fans with his right front leg. He would then stand motionless while a rumbling procession of motorcycles roared out of the inflatable helmet and circled him, delivering cheerleaders in short skirts to the field.

  Even more clamor.

  And Hasan just stood there!

  Motionless. Relaxed.

  As if nothing whatsoever was happening!

  I couldn’t believe it.

  And it all started with a circus ball.

  Hasan’s trainer and constant companion of seventeen years is Allen Pogue. Allen’s work has cast him as a trick trainer (but the word trick does not even scratch the surface and seems to diminish the value to me). What he accomplishes for the horse is so much more than tricks. We’ve just recently discovered Allen, and we’re dumbfounded by how his horses treat him, and try for him. And have fun doing it.

  Fun is a key word here because once basic natural training of a horse has begun in earnest, after the horse has been given the choice of whether or not to be with you, the work is all about maintaining leadership and relationship. But
the repetition can become boring for owner and horse. Allen Pogue’s training of self-motivated behaviors is all about removing the boredom, engaging the brain, and having fun. And communication is no longer a one-way street because the horse can now do something on his own that will speak to you.

  According to Allen, the typical ranch horse or performance horse does not do much reasoning because he’s never asked to. So much typical training is based on the horse’s genetic desire to be safe and comfortable that the usual learning process is heavily slanted toward giving the horse the choice of either doing the behavior or being uncomfortable. Like the simple request that the horse lower his head. It’s either lower it or feel the discomfort of halter pressure on top of your head.

  I’ll take the comfortable route, thank you very much.

  The horse learns. There’s no pain or cruelty. But not much reasoning either. And not a whole a lot of fun.

  Which is why Allen’s methods are so amazing.

  At no other time, other than perhaps during a frolic in the pasture, do we ever get to see the horse having fun. Especially while his brain is engaged and he’s learning.

  Fun?

  What’s that about?

  Most folks grow up assuming that the horse’s capacity to reason and his ability to have fun are just not part of his genetic makeup. And unfortunately those subjects just never come up.

  Didn’t with us.

  Just as with horseshoes, we never really thought about it. I was so focused on becoming one of the herd, using their language, directing them away from the reactive side of their brain—all of which is absolutely necessary to establishing a positive relationship with the horse, and necessary for the horse’s basic training for respect—that it just didn’t occur to me that a horse could reason, much like a dog can reason. Or that the horse could develop a verbal vocabulary, like Benji. The caveat is that all the basic training must come first, because neither reasoning nor vocabulary will occur unless the horse trusts you enough to stay on the thinking side of his brain, and respects you enough to choose you as a herd leader. Without that there is no opportunity for communication in either language, his or ours.

  But why, I scolded myself, especially after years of experience with Benji, did it never occur to me to use verbal vocabulary, or to expect the horse to be capable of rational thought. It was frustrating that none of this bubbled up until I began to worry that I was boring our horses with repetition.

  Was this another episode of following the crowd?

  “I keep telling myself I’m a logical thinker,” I said to Kathleen one evening when we were discussing it. “But I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “I don’t believe we’ve ever heard a trainer or clinician use the word reasoning in reference to a horse,” she said. “Not until Allen. And most clinicians we’ve seen advise against using verbal cues.”

  Now I was beginning to wonder why.

  “Perhaps because the horse’s language in the herd is mostly visual,” she said.

  “So are dogs in a pack, but Benji understands a huge vocabulary.”

  “Why do you worry so? The timing is perfect. You just said that everything we’ve done had to go before trick training.”

  “It’s not trick training,” I said. “It’s self-motivated behavior.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said.

  I sulked off to the computer to read more about Allen. And to see if he sold circus balls. Something new for Cash to focus on. Variety. Something different.

  Cash in particular needs this because he’s so bright. I was teaching him to back through the arena gate, a fairly scary thing for most horses, because a horse’s only visual blind spot lies directly behind him. In front, there’s a small area, right between the eyes, where they cannot see when the object is very close—which is why it’s significant when a horse allows you to rub him on his forehead. Allowing you to rub where he cannot see definitely means he trusts you. But directly behind him he can see nothing unless he turns around or swings his head to the rear. For that reason it has taken quite some time to train some of our horses to back through the open gate. It makes them really nervous. But, like rubbing on the forehead, the process is ultimately a good thing for them because once they finally relax and do it comfortably, they’re telling me, Okay, I trust you. I am no longer afraid that you will back me into a horse-eating fence.

  And the relationship takes a step up.

  The second time I walked Cash up to the gate and began to move his butt around to back him through, he swung right around and backed through all by himself.

  The second time!

  Okay, I’ve got it. What next?

  How about a circus ball?

  Bring it on.

  That’s how I stumbled onto Allen Pogue’s Red Horse Ranch.

  And learned that horses can have fun.

  And can grow to understand words. Even sentences.

  And are fully capable of reasoning.

  It was like the barefoot moment: another cold, wet rag in the face.

  Another duh.

  I’ve been encouraging people for years in talks and seminars to exercise their brains every day. Take ’em out for a jog. The brain, like any other part of the body, works better the more it’s used. And the more it’s used, the better it works.

  And this amazing phenomenon is not exclusive to humans.

  Yet another epiphany.

  The horse is a flight animal. Engaging his brain could be even more important to his ability to focus and reason than ours. It helps him control his own reactive side. Like Hasan did in that boisterous, explosive indoor arena setting.

  “Please, Mr. Camp. I can’t print that. Animals can’t reason.”

  It was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News doing a story about the filming of the original Benji movie.

  I was astonished. I had just spent thirty minutes ranting giddily about the unique concept of a dog acting, about the incredible facial expressions Benji was giving us, about those big brown eyes and the reams of dialogue they were speaking, about the dog himself and how for the first time I had come to realize that the story we were telling wasn’t purely the emotional petition I had once thought but, in reality, quite plausible. Dogs, I had discovered, can think rationally. Can reason. And this particular one was extraordinary.

  Not that other dogs aren’t. Or horses. Or birds.

  But most animals who have the intelligence, attitude, and temperament to do what Benji was doing never have the opportunity to learn and to gain the vocabulary that Benji has.

  “Vocabulary? That’s ridiculous!”

  I bit my tongue because we were on the air. This was later, during a radio talk show in Norfolk, Virginia.

  But Norfolk radio notwithstanding, Benji does have a vocabulary. And now I was beginning to realize that Cash could have one as well. He could think, and he could understand concepts. Just like Benji. Concepts like other. If you ask Benji for a foot, then ask for the other foot, he switches. If he walks off toward a chair and is told to go to the other chair, he looks back to see which one, then takes the point and heads in that direction. He understands the concept of words like slow, hurry, easy, go on, and not, no matter how the words are applied. When he is asked to perform a difficult task, you can actually witness the process as he studies the situation to determine the best approach.

  But none of this is particularly unusual. Sheepdogs in Europe tend entire flocks by themselves for months, keeping the sheep together, deciding when to move them from one pasture to another, even stopping the flock to check for vehicles before crossing a road.

  I read about a horse who was taught to bring a small herd of cattle in from the pasture every week and put them in a pen for a screwworm checkup. He would do this religiously, completely on his own. After a few weeks he decided, again completely on his own, that it was quite a bit easier just to keep them in the pen than to have to go fetch them every week. So he did just that, refusing to let them out.

&
nbsp; At a press conference in a Miami hotel suite, a dozen reporters watched Benji perform one of his standard show routines, completely unaware at the time that he had made a mess of it and would’ve never finished had he not been able to reason it through.

  He was wedged between two banister poles, pulling a coffee mug tied to a string of leashes up to the mezzanine level, which overlooked the group below. A person, of course, would use two hands, one over the other, but Benji used his mouth and a foot. He would reach down and pull up a length, hold it tightly against the floor with his foot, then reach down again and pull up another length, hold it with his foot, and so on, until he had retrieved whatever was tied to the other end. As he performed on this particular day, the leash slipped over the corner of the mezzanine floor and, because he was so snugly wedged between the banister poles, he could no longer reach it with the foot he had always used to hold it. I marveled as I watched the wheels turn. He pondered the situation for only a few seconds before he, quite logically, placed the other foot on the rope—the foot he had never before used to hold it—and went on with the routine as if nothing had happened.

  Benji even understands what he’s doing when he’s acting.

  “Now you’ve heard it all, folks. The dog understands he’s acting! I suppose he gets script approval!”

  Chicago. Another talk show host.

  One of the more important sequences in the original Benji movie involved Benji moping forlornly through town. He knew that children were in danger but was unable to communicate what he knew to the family, who had, in fact, scolded him for trying. For the sequence to work, indeed for the entire story to work, these scenes had to generate unencumbered empathy and support for Benji’s plight. He had to look as if he had lost his last friend. His desperation had to reach out from those big brown eyes and squeeze passionately upon the hearts of the audience.