By Alasdair Crosby
THE text for today is taken from the charming fable about the domestication of wild animals, by Rudyard Kipling in ‘The Just So Stories’ – The Cat that Walked by Itself: ‘When the Man and the Dog came back from hunting, the Man said, ‘What is Wild Horse doing here?’ And the Woman said, ‘His name is not Wild Horse any more, but the First Servant, because he will carry us from place to place for always and always and always.’
For ‘always and always and always’? These days, that might be open to question.
Evolution can sometimes happen quicker than expected. Now, it might seem that the human-equine relationship has evolved. Should the word ‘servant’ be the right one to describe this relationship? It might suggest domination in a top – down working relationship (the exception, of course might be ‘civil servant’, where arguably the reverse is true. But that, as Kipling would have said, is another story).
A new expression of the human-equine relationship in recent times is summed up by the concept of social licensing, or ‘Social Licensing to Operate’ (SLO).
In Jersey recently was Jo Winfield, a trainer and educator for the equestrian sector in the UK. She also has a CV as long as your arm, included in which is being a Fellow of the British Horse Society and an inspector approving riding establishments internationally; she is also a British dressage judge and eventing coach.
‘I failed my A Levels,’ she said. ‘I was told that either I could stay on at college and do another year’ work and pass my exams, or I could leave home. So I left home. Five days later I was working in an event yard. It wasn’t that I lacked brains, I was just unengaged. Then I got a degree in equine science, and a Masters in Coaching Science, and I worked with football and rugby teams and got a professional doctorate (PhD) in decision making around risk management.
‘When I got my degree, I thought “Oh good – I’m not that stupid after all.”’
Recently, Jo was invited by the Jersey branch of the Pony Club to run a short coaching course for the young riders. She also gave a talk to Jersey horse owners that covered the subject of SLO.
Asked how she would describe SLO, she said: ‘It’s about the understanding of how, as humans, we interact with animals. We understand that a lot of our animals are companions – dogs and cats. Often in the UK we see horses as companion animals as well, part of our family and household; equally, we do work with them and they serve a purpose.’
The World Horse Welfare website (www.worldhorsewelfare.org) defines SLO as: ‘an intangible, implicit agreement between the public and those who pursue an activity. If an SLO exists, this shows that the public accepts or approves of that activity and that they will allow it to continue with minimal restrictions. Public opinion can change, however, swinging against an activity it previously approved of. This move towards public disapproval can escalate into loss of that activity’s SLO. This can lead, in turn, to loss of political support, revised legislation and even a total ban on the activity in question.’
Jo said that research over the last ten years had highlighted that between 40% to 60% of the general public – those not connected in any way with horses or riding – said that they were concerned about our interaction with horses and that we shouldn’t be engaging with them for our use, in any shape or form.
The questioning of SLO in the equine world began with horseracing. Jo said: ‘A lot of non-horsey people watch racing on the TV, and that is their only interaction with a horse. The public watch the Grand National and similar high-profile races and they see horses fall. It looks chaotic, and noisy as there are a lot of horses jumping close together, which in their own world they are quite happy with – they are called “a herd” for a reason. Running as a group is not unnatural, and humans tap into that natural ability.
‘A thoroughbred horse is designed to race in a group in a fairly straight line and can jump fences, but the public sees horses in situations where the horse is not looking comfortable, and if they are just watching a race on TV, without ever being near a horse, they are even more removed from the animal and are apt to misunderstand what they see.’
Too many people, she said, did not want to have anything to do with horseracing and often saw riding as associated with racing.
‘The statistics show that the number of fallers and injuries is actually reducing. But the public are unaware or don’t care about the statistics, they just react to what they see on screen – and when it is a high-profile event, it seems even worse. But horses will do daft things anywhere. Horses will make errors; riders will fall off… it’s all part of engaging with a 500-kilo animal.’
The old phrase to describe a young horse’s training – ‘breaking a horse’ – sounds as if we are actually destroying it in some way. Jo said: ‘Actually, we are teaching a horse to allow a rider to get on its back, and be ridden, so better language would be “backing and riding away”. The procedure might be similar to that old language of breaking a horse, but the procedure is actually educating a horse to be comfortable to carry a saddle and a rider, and to be ridden in a way that encourages us to interact with it.
‘But the framing of our language is often why we are misunderstood, so we need to change our language, so that anybody who hears or sees what we do, can understand that we are doing it in partnership with the horse.
‘So, to maintain a social licence to practice equestrianism, in whatever aspect, be it training children at the Pony Club, or racing, or in professional sports, such as top flight dressage or show jumping… we should be very clear about our practices.
‘Everyone in the equestrian sector has a duty to behave responsibly. Coaches are thinking about their current practice, their language, their performance. If anyone is taking videos or pictures, it should not be a problem, because we should be doing everything clearly and transparently’.
‘We should be working ethically with our horses, we should be putting them at the centre of our practice, because we are engaging with them for an outcome, whether it is as a companion for our children, or whether it’s for a performance competition horse, or with horses running as a herd in a horse race.
‘Horses don’t understand human language, they don’t understand words, they understand our behaviour so we need to reflect that they can only communicate with us by their own behaviours. We need to step back and say: “This horse is only behaving this way because…”. Maybe it doesn’t understand us, or we have put it into a position in which it can’t understand us.
‘The horse isn’t being good or bad or naughty, it’s responding in a way in which it is trying to communicate with us. We need to step back and look at those physical elements of its behaviour and question our interactions: is this the behaviour we desire? If so, we should reward it; if not, then rather than punishing the horse, we should ask ourselves: “have we communicated clearly enough so that the horse understands what we want?’
Following incidents in Olympic-standard dressage and pentathlon sectors, that have been generally perceived as cruel or at least distasteful, is there a fear that equestrian sports might be banned from the Olympics?
‘It’s a possibility. In the interval between Olympic Game years, the Olympic Committee holds meetings about the validity of all sports, with new sports coming in, some sports coming out. What will the Olympic Committee include, and what will they deem is not suitable anymore? It goes back to the social licensing of trust, transparency, validity of what we are doing, and how we are doing it.’
Asked if there was an actual licence – a status or certificate that can be granted or forfeited, like a driving licence or a professional licence, Jo replied that it was the public at large – the climate of opinion – that gave equestrians the authority to ride horses. Social licensing originally started with racing, but it’s now moving across to leisure riding as well as to other equestrian sports.
People are realising that there are other things to do with horses apart from riding them, like having them simply as companions. Children can have ‘pony parties’; the empathy of horses with human emotions makes them invaluable in treating both children and adults with mental or physical health issues.
‘Horses should be given the best life that they can have, for the activities that they are doing, lest our social licence be withdrawn.’
This article was first published in the Jersey Evening Post, who have kindly given permission to republish it on this website
