A Sheep Saved Me

Blanche is living up to her name. After a 24-hour heavy rain shower, she now appears as a white, angelic, virginal (she is) apparition when I glimpsed her out amongst the fog-shrouded trees this morning. My son and I now suspect that she has figured out how to open the gate to her pasture. In order to accomplish this feat, she has to deal with two latches, but we think it’s highly probable that she has figured it out.

For a sheep, she’s very intelligent. I remember hearing a long time ago that orphans in institutions are small and sickly because they don’t receive any physical attention. Blanche was an orphan, and there’s nothing more small and sickly than an orphan sheep. But now, people tell me that she’s the largest female sheep they’ve ever seen. I think she’s so huge because I give her lots of physical hugging and massaging . . . and I wouldn’t doubt if this has raised her IQ high enough that she could figure out how to open two latches on a gate.

I was reading a book, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, and in it, a chapter on the intelligence of sheep. The book claims that there have been many instances of sheep that have figured out how to open latches on their enclosures. This book also claims that once they do, the owner immediately takes the sheep to the slaughterhouse because they don’t want to deal with the escapes, and they don’t want to breed sheep that are intelligent.

I’ve been wondering for quite some time what would happen if you bred animals for intelligence and not utility. And conversely, what would happen if humans paid as much attention to developing their instinctual powers as they do their intellectual powers. If this happened, would the world not be a better, happier place?

When I mention that I have a sheep to someone, they invariable say, “Sheep are the dumbest animals in the world.” That’s a mistake, because I’ll give them an earful about how sheep are quite smart, if just allowed to develop their potential. People could learn a lot from a sheep. They are very loving and affectionate. They are very obedient if they trust you. People are always amazed that I walk Blanche for miles, on trafficked roads, visiting people’s houses, and I don’t need to put her on a leash. I would even go so far as to say that a pet sheep is more affectionate than a dog. It always wants to be near you, it thrives on being hugged and petted, and it loves to cuddle. As an added bonus, a sheep can also provide you with enough wool for a beautifully tailored new suit each year.

In the book, The Tao of Equus, the author writes about her experience using horses to help people who are undergoing psychological therapy. Of course the author writes more elegantly than I can when summarizing her ideas, but she claims that horses are tuned in to a different level of consciousness. This allows them to virtually read a human’s deepest emotions. So say, if someone has deep emotional disturbances that they are masking with a faux smile and enthusiasm, the horse will react negatively to this disconnect between the true feelings of the person, and the person’s public persona. On the level on which a horse instinctually exists, it is receiving conflicting data that it finds agitating. This situation, for the person dealing with the horse, is troublesome because the horse will not behave well for a person who is emotionally disconnected from their subconscious.

According to this book, in order to get along well with the horse you don’t need to have solved your hidden psychological troubles, you just need to be acknowledging them and not attempting to paper them over with a false sense of well-being. She also gives the helpful advice that you have to treat the horse as a thinking, feeling being if you want to have a horse that takes care of you. Believe me, you ride on the back of a horse at the horse’s discretion. If the horse wants to kill you, it has many ways to accomplish the task. You need to have a horse that will do everything it can to protect you.

The other day, when I was standing in the pasture petting Tasha, he jerked his head up quickly and whacked my jaw. My pain was intense, and I didn’t want to think what would have happened if he had intentionally wanted to knock me out. According to the Tao of Equus author (maybe I’ll look up her name for you) the horse is aware of where you are at every moment, and so if it whacks you, or if it nuzzles you, that is what it is intending to do. Because of this, it is imperative to purchase or ride horses that have been trained in a gentle manner. You don’t want a horse that has been beaten into submission because that horse doesn’t trust humans, and has no desire to be kind to or bond with a human.

Yesterday, the owner of Tasha wanted me to take out her other horse, Atia, because she wanted her fifteen-year-old niece to ride with me in the afternoon and take Tasha. I had heard from a neighbor, another horse owner, that Atia was probably too spirited for my abilities. However, Atia’s owner assured me that he would be fine. And he was. I enjoyed riding him more than Tasha. He responds to reign commands immediately, so that I can just apply subtle pressure on his neck. I don’t have to pull the bit from the side of his mouth which is a more aggressive, less pleasurable way of reigning, for both me and the horse. Atia is more spirited, but that means he has a faster, more enjoyable walking pace than Tasha.

After the ride yesterday, I had taken off Atia’s saddle and harness, and had brushed him down, and I was thrilled that as I was standing there talking to the girl who rode with me, Atia rubbed my back up and down with his head. According to the book, this is a sign of great affection from a horse. I gave him a big hug around his neck in return.

I was also flattered yesterday, when Tasha was acting up for the girl, who does take formal riding lessons and knows how to handle a horse well, and the owner asked me to calm him down because Tasha was used to me; and I did calm him down. I suspect the girl must be trying to mask some psychological troubles!

The author of The Tao of Equus claims that it is possible for a human to learn from horses how to function on and benefit from, this other, wordless, subliminal level of awareness. I would have thought that assertion was New Age poppycock, if I hadn’t been walking through the woods every day with my sheep for five months prior to reading the book. Animals don’t communicate verbally and so if we really want to commune with them, we have to learn to communicate with them in a silent, instinctual manner: a very difficult task for modern man, and me, to enter into silence in order to access this other psychological level of being. If you can do it, you discover a well-spring of abundant peace and well-being. And you also discover that by relaxing, and letting your “instincts” take over, you don’t have to be constantly passing judgment on every action you take or don’t take. You are just BEING; you’re in a natural state of Zen; you are how you were meant to be from the moment you were born.

The sheep helped me to discover that there is this other level of existing that we humans rarely access. One day, it dawned on me while I was had to work very hard at trying to reach a Zen state, the sheep were perpetually in a Zen state. I realized that the sheep had quite a lot of useful information to impart to me.

The sheep just are. They have a purpose, they don’t question it, and they live non-violent, peaceful, vegetarian lives. (They are the only animal that cannot defend itself in any way. That is the reason they flock together.) Then I got to thinking, that humans also have this powerful instinctual force, the result of millions of years of development which courses through our minds and bodies. What would happen if one allowed this instinctual side to become more highly developed? Our modern society does everything it can to make us slaves to its products and structure; and in order to do this, the innate trust that a person would naturally have in themselves, engendered by a strong reliance on their own innate instinct, has to be sublimated to the more easily manipulated ego-driven intellect. So we become these fat heads with no use for our bodies, no use for nature, no use for our fellow humans except as a source of income and a means of creating matter to consume. The instinctual, spiritual side is devalued and slowly dies. As a result, the sensual, the amorous, the spiritual, the Holy Grail that we truly are searching for during our short sojourn on this planet, are lost to us. That’s the reason people are studying Zen, are becoming fundamentalists (pick your religion), are enveloped in a fog of drugs/alcohol/consumption. We’ve lost our instinctual foundation that allows us to just be: be content with ourselves, be content with the decisions we make, be content with the world and its order, be secure enough to love unconditionally and be loved.

An animal, if allowed a large degree of freedom, can teach you contentment, can teach you to trust your decision making skills, can teach you to love yourself and others, and can teach you how to access your deeper spiritual self.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

(Oh, the author of The Tao of Equus is Linda Kohanov!)