A Year at the Races by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley [Jane Smiley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571305650
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

I came to see that a clever horse is one who can open gates and pick up small pieces of carrot that he can’t see. An intelligent horse is a horse who learns his set tasks quickly and also accepts their importance, even if they are not “natural” horse activities. And a wise horse, one who has integrated his psychological intelligence with his others, is one who recognizes opportunities for learning (which are really opportunities for adapting to the life he leads) and who actively seeks to make his life easier by figuring things out and by attending to the most knowledgeable being in his world, which might be a horse or might be a person. I know a vet who was able to rescue a horse from a trailer accident in which his legs were jammed through the sides of the trailer, because the horse, without sedation, let his owner quiet him and keep him still. He allowed his attachment to and trust in the owner override his potential panic.

Do horses have consciousness—that is, a psychological intelligence of the self that complements the psychological intelligence directed toward the group? Those who say they do are few and far between. In fact, there are experts on human intelligence, like Daniel Dennett, who maintain that humans don’t have consciousness, either—that human consciousness is a false by-product of the workings of the brain. Nevertheless, let’s say that humans do have consciousness, and that consciousness is the sense of a consistently felt self experiencing the world. Perhaps I can say, “I am running, I am jumping,” but perhaps a horse can only say, “Am running, am jumping,” or even, “Running, jumping.” Theorists of consciousness in humans admit that they can’t prove their theories, either for or against, because to do so would be to devise an experiment that replicates the same world that the subject of the experiment experiences. Thus also with the inner life of the horse or the dog; I can infer it, but I can’t prove it, just as I can infer the inner life of my friend, but can’t prove it exists. I do think, though, that there are a few hints that horses have an “I.”

For those who accept that humans develop an actual sense of self, the stages through which this development progresses are fairly well defined. In the second year of life, experiments have shown, the human child begins to distinguish himself from those around him. Gardner writes, “The child is starting to react to his own name, to refer to himself by name, to have definite programs and plans that he seeks to carry out, to feel efficacious when he is successful, to experience distress when he violates certain standards others have set for him or that he has set for himself” (p. 246). With the possible exception of referring to themselves by name, horses give evidence of each of these perceptions. They quickly learn to respond to their names, even when they are given several names over the course of a lifetime.

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