The Blind Giant (34 page)

‘Well, let’s see if we can do something about that,’ the guy in the aviator jacket says.

They lead the horse into the paddock. He’s not small, but he is, as promised, utterly benign. He looks around, perhaps a bit wary, but mostly just curious. From where he’s standing, he can see the bright circle of the paddock bounded by a high metal fence, and beyond that maybe also the faces of a couple of thousand people arranged on bleachers all around to see this demonstration. If so, the audience doesn’t seem to bother him. Everyone is being very, very quiet – these are horse people, and this is serious for them. They don’t want to spook the animal, because it’s not fair to him and could cause a serious problem for the trainer. The owner leaves the paddock, and the big guy scratches the horse between the eyes for a moment. What he absolutely does not do is whisper to the horse. He has been called a horse whisperer, and while that title is probably useful, it’s also starkly at odds with what he believes and wants everyone here to learn: he doesn’t talk to horses. He listens to them.

Monty Roberts is an American classic: silver-haired and broad-shouldered, light on his feet, commanding and charismatic. At the moment he’s wearing a cloth cap in addition to the aviator jacket, a piece of traditional British trainer gear. On other occasions, he sports a Stetson. Roberts, though, is not a cowboy in the conventional sense. He abhors violence in general, and in particular in the context of training horses. ‘Violence is never the answer,’ he says, over and over, in interviews and articles and during his demonstrations.

When Roberts is sure the horse is relaxed, he signals to his team and they reverse a horsebox to the paddock gate, and one of the assistant trainers leads the horse towards the box. Roberts holds up a wrist in a plastic splint and explains that he got kicked a few weeks ago and has been told not to take risks with his arm while it heals. You have the impression that he listens to that advice maybe 60 per cent of the time, dropping to 20 per cent if no one’s looking and zero if there’s something that really needs doing and nobody else can do it. Right now, though, he’s playing
it safe and letting the much younger trainer test the horse’s resistance to loading.

And that resistance turns out to be pretty absolute. The horse stops dead a few metres from the box and won’t go any further, becoming more and more unhappy with each attempt to persuade him, and ultimately trying with growing urgency to escape. Before the urgency can turn into real terror, Roberts calls a halt.

‘That’s where we used to try pushing him in with brooms,’ the owner says from the side.

In my mind, that conjures images of a mob from a Hammer horror movie poking at the horse with agricultural implements as if he were Christopher Lee in a black cloak. If Roberts finds the idea unusual or annoying, it doesn’t show.

‘How did that work out?’ he asks.

‘It was awful,’ the owner says.

Roberts doesn’t reproach her. He nods in a way that acknowledges that anyone can make a mistake, especially under pressure, and she’s here now and that’s a much better choice than brooms. He starts to work with the horse. He sends him away first, running him around the paddock enough times so that he covers three-eighths of a mile. That’s a crucial number in the Roberts universe; predators in the wild are sprinters, so a horse that has run that distance and survived has outlasted the enemy and can stop and relax. Everything Roberts does, he says, he learned from watching horses themselves. This isn’t training in the conventional sense; it’s communication.

When the horse slows and drops his head, Roberts tells the audience, it means he wants to come and form some sort of understanding with the only other animal in the paddock. It’s all a negotiation. If he can’t run away, can he form a relationship with the human which does not involve being eaten? The range of options is primal, and Roberts describes it in primal terms: big cats jump up, on to the back of a prey animal,
looking for the throat. Wolves attack low, looking for the legs or the belly. A saddle, in this simple, savage lexicon, is ‘where the cats go’. Taking a saddle for the first time is stressful because instinct says something on your back is about to kill you. The girth strap is ‘where the dogs go’, and means evisceration. We listen. And then, bang on time, the horse comes in off the paddock fence.

Roberts makes himself small, curving his back and drawing his arms in tight to his body, and turns away. Eye contact is a threat, so he doesn’t let it happen. The horse takes a few steps closer. Roberts doesn’t seem to notice. He’s still, and calm, and not interested. The horse comes closer, and still, Roberts waits. Finally, the horse nudges him on the shoulder: ‘Hey, you!’ Roberts makes a fuss of him, very quietly, scratches his forehead again, then takes a step away. The horse follows as if on a rein. Roberts keeps walking, and the horse follows. They go around the paddock a few times, Roberts abruptly changing direction, zig-zagging, and the horse follows.

Inevitably, because the paddock is not large, Roberts eventually arrives near the horsebox. He slows. The horse slows too, peering at the old enemy. Roberts makes no move towards the horsebox, wanders off again, and the horse ambles after him. Then he goes back. Then away. Each time they get a little closer to the box, and each time the horse spends some time checking it out. Roberts walks towards the box, and the horse comes too. Roberts walks up the ramp. The horse stops. Roberts stops, reverses the horse away from the ramp and away. They loop around the paddock, then come back. This time, the horse puts his front hooves on the ramp. He doesn’t like it very much, but he wants to follow Roberts. He pokes at the ramp, and it clanks. Roberts repeats the reverse, and comes back for a third time.

When the horse follows him all the way up the ramp and into the horsebox, Roberts barely seems to notice. He turns right
around and walks out again. The crowd, on the other hand, has absolutely noticed. Many of them have been down this road, and they know that what they’ve just seen is spectacular, bordering on spooky. The owner has her hand over her mouth. This simply doesn’t happen with non-loaders. It’s so unlikely that even though his methods are reproducible – and reproduced successfully by thousands of trainers and owners around the world – people still accuse Roberts of fakery. Roberts walks the horse around the paddock, back into the box without breaking step. This time they stay for a while. The horse investigates the box a bit. Whatever he thought was in there clearly isn’t.

Roberts walks him out again, then once more round the paddock, and this time the horse doesn’t even need to be led. He’s in the habit. When Roberts stops, the horse walks past him, right up the ramp and into the box, turns around and peers out, as if to ask what all this fuss was ever really about. The whole process has taken less than half an hour.

Roberts makes everyone wait until the horse is well away before they applaud, but I imagine you can hear the sound from the next county.

Monty Roberts is at pains to say that what he does isn’t magic. He hasn’t used a Blacksmith’s Word. He’s just made a connection with a confused animal. It’s something that – demonstrably – anyone can do, given the appropriate training and practice. The part of what he does that is more difficult to teach is the human side: he works an audience with the same facility he displays with horses, a trick that is even more impressive because he can actually do both at once. He’s also keen to point out that the horses he works with in his shows in the UK are horses he has never seen before, and they’re not suddenly turned into something different by what he does. Put them in a stress situation and miscommunicate and they can go right back to where they were. The conversion from non-loader to self-loader requires
maintenance at home, an ongoing reassurance and instruction in the simple body language horses use among themselves and understand.

It seems to me that we are like a horse – and like Monty Roberts – at the same time.

Roberts’s achievement is not leading. It looks that way because the horse ends up following him around the paddock, but looks are deceptive. What he’s done is the ultimate in a very handy digital skill: following. He’s derived his method of helping horses to understand what’s required of them – and that is what he does – by following their lead. He watched the interactions of wild horses, taught himself the body language and the pattern of their engagements, and worked out how to insert himself into the loop. The result is absolutely remarkable.

And – up to a point – it’s possible to do something similar with the self. We know an ever-increasing amount about our own behaviour, and as I’ve tried to point out, much of it is irrational. There’s no particular need to be worried about that, unless you have constructed your way of life on the notion that humans are at root a profoundly rational bunch – in which case, to be honest, I have to question your skills of observation. But it’s also true that as information on how we as individuals and as groups behave becomes more widely available and understood, we are apt to find those behaviours being used to lead us about by the nose – unless we make an effort to take charge of ourselves. At the same time, to get along with digital technology – to use its advantages in beating the modern malaises we created it to defy, without in turn being changed in directions we would not choose, or perhaps worse simply made unhappy – we need to be aware of how we live and use our tools.

The following list may make some people a bit uncomfortable, because it includes things that are not generally thought of
as serious or important. That’s partly because the rational/professional ethos that most of us grew up with defines ‘serious’ and ‘important’ things as those that are instrumental and effective in making money and achieving concrete results, and doesn’t make a lot of space for play, or for the hearth. In fact, its area of competence is bounded by those things, so it tends to dismiss them. As that ethos increasingly tries to claim our attention through the extended hearth, so we have to push back and assert their importance. (It’s like the pressure suits doctors wear in biohazard zones, which are inflated from within so that any puncture will cause air to flow out rather than letting infectious agents in.)

The idea that you might choose a path that meant you got less rather than more stuff done is alien to many of us, but the need to do more is where the sense of time slipping away comes from. There is, after all, a finite limit to the amount one person can do in one day, and it’s not clear that doing more makes you happier. Sometimes, happiness is about sitting still for …

How long would you say? Ten minutes? An hour? A day?

Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement in Italy, told
Carl Honoré: ‘Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context … What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.’ It seems to me that you cannot possibly know what your tempo should be if you’re always flat out. You have no idea what you, yourself, look like at another speed. We as individuals and as a society have to choose who we want to be. Refusing to do so is no longer a neutral posture, if it ever was. We are surrounded by forces that will influence us, some of them actively working to do so using information and tools created by interactions with massive numbers of individuals, constantly being refined. Being inert means being washed away by this current, and trusting that governments, and large technology companies and the institutions that hire them to influence
us, know better than we do how the world should be and have our best interests at heart.

Like most people, I suspect, I don’t believe that’s the case; the pace, priorities and nature of modern life in the industrialized world create an environment that is not ultimately a human paradise. The unease people report as information overload or future shock is not a product of digital technology; it predates even the mobile telephone. It comes from the way we live, the division of time and the emphasis on getting more done, and our naïve (in the sense of inexperienced rather than careless or foolish) use of abstract systems in the form of government bureaucracy and commercial companies to take advantage of our collective strength and to attempt to ensure fairness; we have come to see these systems as external objects, and are only now beginning to understand them as re-editable products. Digital technology is one of the coping strategies we have evolved to deal with a sense of disconnection, of being out of control; a treatment for the symptom rather than the disease, but which has enabled us to see our own reflection and to understand the situation.

Technology is not born pure, however: it is the result of a commercial design process. In other words, there was a demand for something to manage time and space, to connect us, and the society we have gave us mobile phones and the Internet. The revolution was – as all revolutions are – hijacked before it was born. The technologies of reconnection have been incorporated into the structure of the world and have become in some ways part of the problem, but how we use them and respond to them is up to us.