Alex, that's a very interesting aspect indeed! It urges me to treat you with another lengthy story which might put some seeds into your soul.
A couple of months ago, I received two very enigmatic e-mails concerning a horse named Zivilist. This horse owns an own website
Zivilist.it, and this website confused me even more (it's also in English).
For a long time, I thought they would make fun of me and the rest of the world and put up a huge fake, but then it turned out that the books about this horse do exist and can be bought on the antiquarian market. What surprised me even more was that people were willing to pay high prices for these books, prices I was not willing to pay just for curiosity.
As they pretended that they had none left themselves, I proposed that they would lend me their copies for a while in order to find out what's all about it. Finally they managed to give me two brand-new copies. Allegedly, they were written by a vet, so I started to hunt for this person, to no avail. The foreword starts with his surprise when he was called for the first time to the horse and his owner. The horse was five years old then. The owner called him in human language: "Zivilist, come on, the vet is here!" The horse came from the pasture, investigated the vet from the front and from behind, which indeed irritated him a little, but he was even more surprised when she commanded him to breathe in and out and open his mouth and show his tongue and so forth.
That's when he decided to not lose track of those two, so he followed them for the next 17 years. Wherever this woman would go with her horse, he would be with them as their vet -- that's what he told me when I called him up in Italy, where he stranded when the horse died there in 2006 at age 22. With friends, he founded a league to celebrate the memory of this horse, found a park for kids and animals because this woman -- among other things -- seemed to have worked with kids who were doomed to die, and these kids loved this horse as well.
They even want to finance a statue of this horse, and maybe it will be placed at this park. A final book is about to be written to cover his last life span. They also dream of making a movie about the life of this horse, preferably with prominent actors and directors like Robert Redford. The author really is a vet, but he uses a pen name for professional reasons. He is German, the woman is German, and the whole story starts in Germany. I had read only half of the first book yet when I decided to call up the person in Italy who had contacted me. It turned out that he was the author of the books. He told me that she even went to America with this horse and finally to Italy.
She didn't use this horse in any way, not even for the work with children. He was her friend and was treated as friend. You wouldn't command your friends and try to make them behave like you want to, would you? The kids knew sooner or later that she had this friend and they wanted to get to know him. So they became friends of him as well, and the vet told me that through this friendship it was much easier for them to die.
When this woman bought the foal at the age of five months, she was at her early 20s and didn't know anything about horses. She had a dog which was her friend, but dogs are different from horses. The description of horse people she unavoidably came in contact with, to begin with the guy who sold her the foal, and then all those people she needed to have a place for her horse, is really brilliant. He doesn't accuse anybody, he just tells it as it is, and in doing so, you can't but conclude that things are just horrible.
The worst problem seems to be that people look at horses as a means. Horses cost money and time and energy, so they have to behave and to perform and it's quite alright for everybody that horses have to play their part just like any other thing, a car for example, which is not only used to transport people from here to the next place but also to provide prestige and whatnot.
Of course, this woman is irritated quite a lot by all these people who are experts and know exactly how to manage a horse, so she makes a lot of mistakes, but she finds out very quickly that her horse tells her immediately what he thinks about all this, and she listens, and as he is her friend, she believes him more than all these people who try to manipulate her and mistreat her horse.
Instead of reading on, I decided to ask the author for the permission to publish the book in parts in my magazine. As the book is out of print and they want to promote the cause of this horse, he agreed, so we started, and the first reaction was overwhelming. The promises of the foreword excited people, but then the interest dropped sharply; I can only speculate about the reasons, but I think it's quite obvious. The beginning of the story is so commonplace and depressing that it's no fun to read.
If you had a book, you could read on and get to the happy end quite quickly, so I managed to interest the publisher of my own books to reissue these two books and published the third one once it's completed. We agree that publishing the book periodically will not diminish the commercial success of the book but rather push it, so I'm looking forward to find out if this is true. The first editions of the books were financed by the friends of this vet. I think there are three different language editions, German, English and Italian, but anyway, they are all out of print now.
I was fascinated by the idea to drop the common understanding of the role of the horse completely and just appreciate him as a fellow being capable of forming friendships with people. Out of this unusual approach which was aimed at communication and love -- which is the core of friendship -- developed not only a deep personal experience but also new insights in communication possibilities of animals.
Imagine you were a horse and would be put into a box all day and if somebody came he would shout at you in a short, harsh sounds, he would push you around, kick you in the belly and pull at something he puts in your mouth. How would you feel?
He would "work" with you, you would be willing to please him, but you would have a very hard time to find out what he really wants, and if you do, you wouldn't understand why he wants that. For example, this woman finally bought a book to learn about horses. One day a friend came by and witnessed how she walked the horse and stopped him and walked him again and stopped him and so on. The friend was puzzled and asked her what she was doing. She explained to him that she taught the horse to walk. He laughed at her: "That's nonsense! The horse already knows how to walk."
Of course, the objection here is that the horse doesn't know how to walk correctly, so it has to be trained just like a ballet dancer must train to walk correctly -- in the sense of the ballet doctrine. Now, this training is extremely hard and actually a pain nobody would like to be forced to be subject to in real life. Some people would like to dance ballet, but most do not, and even some who do are relieved when they decide to quit (I once got to know a professional dancer who did just that after a very long sickness, and he was glad he did).
You may have heard of a German dog who became a scientific celebrity. He became famous first as star in the TV show where he proved that he could understand some 120 words by finding things out of a pile through word commands. Scientists from the Max Planck Society for Evolutionary Anthropology have worked with this Bordercollie named Rico and proved that he could even learn more than 200 words. The results were published in Science edition 304; there is a Wikipedia article about Rico with links to further readings in the German Wikipedia.
So I was suspicious when I learned that this horse should have known even more words than this dog. But again, the relationship between this woman and her horse was not a scientific program, and she didn't want to use him to produce records. It just developed in a natural way as a byproduct of her definite decision to treat him as friend and talk to him in her human language as she would do with any friend. He didn't have to perform in order to be appreciated. As a friend, he had her unconditional love beforehand, and she just wanted to make sure that he could enjoy his life and that they would have a good time together.
Eventually, she would even ride on him because both of them wanted to. This reminded me in a certain way of the experience of Carolyn Resnik with her wild mare who invited her one of these days to ride on her. This woman has a very different approach, however. She wasn't fascinated with horses to begin with, and she didn't have any goals other than take up the responsibility for the being totally dependent on her and make the best out of their shared time.
I'm really curious about the development of this relationship which was so impressive that this vet devoted part of his life to this horse. Of course, I asked him about the scientific significance, and he told me that he had many conversations with ethologists, but these people are not in the right mood. They think of living beings as a kind of extremely complicated machine, and their interest is not to find out something about the wonders of creation, but rather to push their career, so everything which is not in vogue in the scientific community will be neglected.
No, he's not interested in furthering scientific progress but rather in spreading the news about growing the powers of the soul by treating animals and specially horses as friends like she did. He doesn't pretend that every horse owner will be able to develop his own relationship as she had, he doesn't pretend that every horse would be able to become as special as Zivilist, he just wants to tell the world that there once was such a horse. Maybe the world is ready to learn from him.
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