Diseño de Vigas.

This is so exciting isn’t it? I barley slept last night. I think doing Join-up really is the cornerstone of these teaching methods. I remember reading about how Monty did it with that wild horse and I remember thinking, I want to do that one day! Obviously I’ll never get the chance to do it with a wild horse, but this is close. I tried it once with my own horse but I was just running around behind him while he swished his tail. I think this connection is so special.

Lucy

Natural horsemanship does more that just blur the lines of the horse as a subject or an object. To suggest, universally, that horses are ever one or the other is limiting; and in the case of natural horsemanship, horses are very much considered as ‘significant others’ that are recognized as actively interacting in the process of training. These are moments of ‘becoming’ for horse and human; where each becomes committed to taking the other seriously, putting aside their ‘inherited histories’ in the anticipation of a joint future (Haraway 2003: 23). Here, each agent takes a chance on the other, discovering a transpecies playing field that is free from misplaced ideas of cultural or biological determinism and is, instead, open to the potentials that each individual brings to the pitch. Helen Verran may describe these moments in the round-pen as ‘emergent ontologies’ as both horse and human discover how each others knowledge practices ‘get on together’ (Verran 2002).

The moment of Join-up perhaps shows most obviously these moments of togetherness that are lost, found, reignited, corrupted, mistaken, flawed, perfected, analysed, created and sustained, or grasped for and missed. However this moment occurs, each ‘person’ has learnt something from the situation. Taking a lead from Barad, the

moment of Join-up is a prime example of two significant others intra-acting, where each agent is forever changed in subtle. However, throughout the training process, there is a continuity of intra-active learning that captures both moments that are considered a success, and those that are ‘put down to practice’ as a moment of becoming passes wistfully by. Human and horse are constantly learning about the other, and adapting based on the learned knowledge of each encounter.

The moment of Join-up with a horse in the round pen usually provokes a massive learning curve for people, often with them describing it as a ‘light bulb moment’ - partly because of the obvious connection that is made with the horse, but also because it is a direct reaction to something that they did correctly. The horses used for training people are usually fairly calm, slow-reacting horses, so that people can learn through positive experiences. In this way the horses play a very active role in training the people. It is the moment of understanding and action in these scenarios that make the relationship real to them, to both of them, horse and human. When people do not succeed at Join-up, or the horse makes a half-hearted attempt it is not viewed

negatively but as a path to learn more. Natural horsemanship is very much about the continued training, and the progression of the bond between two actants. What is always important though is the notion of finishing on a good note for both the horse

and human - which is emphasized less in traditional circles which is more about ensuring the horse finishes by doing what you want.

Horses have the capacity to behave in varying, complex, intriguing, and charismatic ways that add to the interest and necessity of natural horsemanship groups as humans learn to live with them. These mutual ‘choreographies’ (Cassidy 2007b) are often enacted within the round-pen, with peaks and troughs of achievement set against a background score of the trainers words and active hopefulness. This is more than just a metaphor for an active process, these are new naturecultures in action; horse and human dancing their way through a series of laid-out and free-style movements, rebelliously on occasion, adjusting to the rhythms of the other to make a hybrid connection of two very different ‘horsey’ natures. It is an attempt on both sides to understand and unpack the other, to make a new (joint)self. The domestication of horses and their current role as companion animals and kin within the natural horsemanship community creates certain expectations of how they are supposed to

behave. Simultaneously, however, these people believe that they are obligated to behave in a certain way towards the horses within the worlds that they have shaped together.

There have been many ethonographies of national parks and other ‘wild’ spaces that concern themselves with how these wildernesses are tied up in social, political and economical institutions, recreating them as a contested domain (Suzuki 2007). As Cassidy says, this idea of the ‘wilderness’ has ‘successfully been complicated in such a way as to put the social back in to the wild’ (Cassidy 2007b: 1, see MacNoughton and Urry 1998; Whatmore 2002). By contrast, natural horsemanship takes its lead from the behaviours of wild horses, whereby practitioners may consider that they are allowing their horses an element of ‘wildness’ through the recognition of expressed behaviours that are also seen in their wild counterparts. Other work by Mullin has also suggested a recent trend in the human-animal sphere of the 21st Century towards recruiting the historical legacy of companion animals wild affiliates when considering their behaviour or husbandry (2007). Mullin cites the competitive world of the pet food industry who invoke ‘science’ to give weight to what they consider to be the nutritional demands of pets, based on the lifestyles and habits of their wild relatives (2007); the wild ‘serves as a powerful resource in commercial and popular culture’ for reconsidering ideas of domestication (Mullin 2007: 277).

Although ideas of domestication are many and complicated, it could be said that ‘domestication’ refers to the taming and control of breeding of a species, whereas ‘tamed’ denotes a one on one relationship between an individual human and

individual animal (Cassidy 2007b). Or, it could be suggested that domestication has been a process that is emphasised either from biological aspects (such as the control of breeding) (Clutton-Brock 1994; Bökönyi 1989), or as a co-evolutionary one that highlights the social aspects (Fijn 2011). Practitioners of natural horsemanship would happily consider horses as domesticated animals, but this does not occlude them from inhabiting elements of both ‘wild’ and ‘tame’ horses. The practice of natural

horsemanship can serve to ‘tame’ an unruly horse or further the training of another, but they can still revert to type and have ‘wild’ moments. It could also be said then that horses are not fully domesticated at all, and merely ‘tamed’, retaining an element of wildness and that is always waiting to come out; depending on the situation this

‘wildness’ can be manifested as the horse being simply spirited, or seen as bad behaviour by my informants:

Lucy: The other day it was so windy that for the first five minutes it was like holding on to wild Mustang! I was literally skiing across the sand.

Sasha: Tilly was so wild the other day! She was doing handstands every time I tried to get near her.

In this chapter I consider the ways in which ideas of the ‘wild’, the ‘tame’ and ‘domestication’ are intertwined in the process of Join-up, the cornerstone of Roberts’ natural horsemanship methods. Domestication is no longer seen as being in opposition to the complicated notion of the wild, and instead investigating these avenues opens up interesting slippages in the deployment of these terms. This could lead to an unexpected level of complexity and the shaping of both parties. This is an ideal example of a ‘practice of domestication’ that Russell discusses (2007) that does not represent an unequal power relationship – where the human could be argued to

undergo a form of domestication. This process aids in how horses could be seen as kin (see Chapter six), through simultaneous ideas of engagement and detachment (Candea 2010). It is an example of taking seriously ‘the impact of unintended consequences and the roles of nonhuman participants’ in a contemporary shared space (Cassidy 2007: 5). Ideas of the ‘natural’ are deployed in natural horsemanship idioms and practices to justify techniques: these ideas sit side by side with expectations and ideas of what a ‘horse’ should be as they become a part of a new, shared, world.

Irvine states that ‘although [horses] can bond emotionally to humans, they do not incorporate humans into their social groups’ (2004: 15). My work amongst NH practitioners has led me to disagree with this; my informants would certainly challenge this assumption as the back-bone of NH training works by mimicking the role of matriarchal horses in a herd. Fijn’s work with Mongolian herders also suggests that humans can be incorporated into a horse’s social group as a dominant member. Behavioural manipulation in these herds kept to a minimum and the horses are not restricted through movement, social interaction, or maternal interaction. Instead, these normal behavioural repertoires are utilised by herders to control the herd (2011).

Interestingly, although horses are considered a domestic animal, their wild

counterparts have the potential to become ‘tamed’ and consequently could be seen to be ‘domesticated’ through training practices. My informants were keen to attribute this to the horses natural intelligence, generosity, curiosity and willingness. For example, Monty Roberts famously ‘tamed’ a wild horse, Shy Boy, in the plains of Nevada and brought him back home with him (Roberts 1999). The process of

selective breeding for type and temperament has certainly made horses more biddable, however, domestication, like many categories, is not a fixed one with only a start and an end point, it is a spectrum of variations. Horses move fluidly among these

spectrums. Therefore there is space for a reconsideration of domestication practices in this case that do not rest solely on traditional enquiries and classificatory principles (Clutton-Brock 1989) and instead I consider how engagement and detachment, and ideas of habituation, can help inform how this practice can be seen as a process of sharing worlds and creating a ‘mutuality of being’ (Kohn 2013).