Kropotkin emphasized that the collective defense strategies of large nonpredatory animals are highly intimidating to even the most ambitious carnivores. “In the Russian Steppes, [wolves] never attack the horses otherwise than in packs; and yet they have to sustain bitter fights, during which the horses sometimes assume offensive warfare,” he wrote in Mutual Aid. “If the wolves do not retreat promptly, they run the risk of being surrounded by the horses and killed by their hooves.”
Large cats are more dangerous than wolves, of course, but lone hunters also know their limits. Recently, a horse owner named Talea Morgan-Metivier posted an astonishing nighttime video of a mare chasing a mountain lion out of a small corral — with her two-day-old foal trotting merrily beside her.
Trance of Conditioning
These and countless other examples challenge our culture’s most cherished beliefs about the drama of survival, opening up new possibilities, new nature-based metaphors, for a more evolved approach to power. Several uniquely human attributes currently hold us back, however. That big Homo sapiens brain we’re so proud of can act like a steel trap, bolstering a species-wide tendency to cling to old beliefs that contrast with an ever-expanding view of reality. Scientists, politicians, religious leaders, and even horse trainers are guilty of this. For centuries, some members of these seemingly unrelated groups conspired to treat animals (and until very recently, women and minorities) as mindless, soulless machines.
Hoping to avoid the cardinal sin of anthropomorphizing other species, far too many researchers promoted a dismal, sometimes-damaging form of mechanomorphism — in extreme cases conducting sadistic experiments on “unfeeling” animals and “unevolved” races (and the Nazi experiments are not the only example, though they were among the cruelest and most disturbing). This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why it took well over a century after Darwin for the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness to agree with him that all creatures possess some level of emotion and intelligence.
In 2001, during lectures for my first book, The Tao of Equus, the persistence of this mechanistic belief system was still apparent. People would occasionally walk out in disgust when I suggested that horses and other animals had feelings and were intelligent enough to move beyond pure instinct. Since then, hundreds of books and documentaries on the emotional lives of animals have swayed a wider public, but there’s always a learning edge. Twelve years later, on tours for The Power of the Herd, I faced another round of resistance when I presented the idea that, as omnivores, we are capable of choosing freely between predatory and nonpredatory forms of power. Audiences on the whole were encouraged by this view, but some equestrians were dismissive, even hostile. I was surprised to find that a small but vocal number of people felt an almost religious fervor in categorizing all humans as predators, perhaps because the oft-touted opposite, “prey,” was too horrifying to bear.
Built upon the deceptively efficient, sometimes-lethal combination of predatory power and mechanomorphism, modern civilization continues to indoctrinate humans into this steely interpretation of life in a thousand subtle ways. From the laboratory and the classroom to the boardroom and even the barn, stoic authority figures urge people to leave their feelings at the door. When ambitious leaders make decisions that marginalize others, the ubiquitous line “it’s business, not personal” purports to absolve the aggressors.
What will it take to wake from the trance of our conquest-oriented heritage and reclaim the ability to choose among a much longer list of natural, mutually supportive, socially intelligent behaviors?
The First Step
In this effort, it’s helpful to appreciate the differences between carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore behavior, while recognizing “predator” and “prey” as situational designations. We sometimes forget that lions, wolves, tigers, and coyotes are also preyed upon — by other carnivores and by human trophy hunters. At the opposite end of the spectrum, fully empowered, adult herbivores do not act like victims in daily life. The young and old of all species are most at risk for finding themselves in the role of “prey animal.” Their survival depends on the actions of courageous parents, siblings, pride or pack members, herd members, and even individuals from other species who put themselves at risk to protect the vulnerable.
Still, there are important distinctions between the assertive, nonlethal forms of power herbivores develop and the killing-consuming orientation of carnivores, though lions, wolves, and their domesticated cousins can also adopt nonpredatory behaviors, especially in relationship to animals and people they consider kin. Nature depends upon predators to keep life in balance with available resources, but through mutual aid, the hormone oxytocin, and the impressive protective abilities of potential prey, four-legged carnivores are prevented from decimating large herbivore populations. In trying to justify callous, sociopathic tendencies, conquest-oriented human cultures overidentify with inaccurate, cartoonlike images of humanity’s status as “king of the jungle,” using the idea that we are at the top of the food chain to exploit other species without reservation. The repercussions are reliably catastrophic.
To mitigate the dysfunctions that lead to war, economic crises, and environmental devastation, our species needs to cultivate an advanced knowledge of natural principles. In an act not unlike pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we must learn to function more like ecosystems rather than rabid predators or meek and disempowered prey. If we cannot evolve, consciously, in this way, apocalyptic predictions will become a devastating reality, and life on this planet may reach the point of no return.
Here’s the good news: A pattern for this transformation already exists, one that occurs over and over again, throughout history and around the world, whenever carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores combine forces through the process of mutual domestication.
Made for Each Other
In 1992, Meg Daley Olmert, an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker, was developing a series about the human-animal bond. Her interdisciplinary findings resulted in unexpected insights on how our ancestors formed associations with other animals, eventually resulting in interspecies partnerships that, in the process, changed the behavior and neurophysiology of our own species.
Olmert’s years of dedicated research eventually led to her 2009 book Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond, which I highly recommend reading for its amazingly accessible discussion of interspecies evolution and, in particular, of the role of the hormone oxytocin in this process.
Over the last thirty years, studies involving rats, prairie voles, dogs, and humans have demonstrated that oxytocin makes mammals less fearful and more curious, encouraging individuals not only to form pair bonds, nest, and nurture their young but to leave the nest and explore unfamiliar territory, most especially new relationships. In her book The Oxytocin Factor, Swedish scientist Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg, reports that “when given oxytocin, groups of rats of the same sex become more gregarious and less afraid of contact. As aggression in the group decreases noticeably, friendly socialization replaces it. Rather than avoid each other, the rats prefer to sit next to each other. This closeness leads in its turn to the release of still more oxytocin.”
The hormone is increased on both sides of an interaction when mothers nurse their young, and when animals of any age groom one another. In undertaking her influential research to understand how the hormone works, Uvnäs-Moberg used oxytocin injections to isolate its effects. Subsequent experiments showed ever-more-startling results, including elevated pain thresholds, faster wound healing, and heightened learning capacity. But she could never fully separate oxytocin’s influence on an individual’s physiology from the hormone’s prime directive: to calm and connect with others.
“Surprisingly, to a lesser degree, animals that live in the same cage but have not directly received the oxytocin also show the same changes,” she marvels. “The other animals in the cage become calmer and have lower levels of stress hormones.” Subsequent experiments showed that oxytocin’s benefits could be spread not only through nursing and direct touch, but through smell, vocal tone, and the concentrated attention that mothers engage in when adoring their newborns and people exhibit in gazing at beloved pets. This