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Horse Head: Brain Science & Other Insights
Horse Brain Science & Other Insights is an essential and entertaining guide to the horse’s mind. This book, with contributions from Dr. Steve Peters, co-author of Evidence-Based Horsemanship, introduces readers to fascinating neuroscience, connecting what we see from the saddle to what’s happening on a microscopic scale, in the horse’s brain. Additionally, HorseHead offers enjoyable chapters on best practices and essays on the journeys of lives with horses.
216 pages, Paperback
Published March 21, 2019
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February 5, 2020
“Horses are not people. We know this is true. But attend any horse event, enter any tack shop, open any horse magazine, and you’ll come away thinking otherwise.”
So begins Horse Head—Brain Science & Other Insights by Maddy Butcher (with Dr. Steve Peters), a book that asks us to stop anthropomorphizing the hell out of the horse and to start seeing and understanding this animal on its own terms.
“We make horse actions personal and emotionally complex,” writes Butcher. “He likes kisses. He needs his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Look, he’s nodding ‘yes.’ We’re friends. He loves me! It’s fun but it’s wrong. Of course, horses DO have feelings, motivations, and goals. But from a scientific point of view, they’re much more basic than ours. They want to move. They want to forage. They want to rest. They want to be with other horses.”
Loaded with insights into brain science, Horse Head takes off from there, exploring all aspects of horse behavior and horse mentality. Butcher, the founder and director of the Best Horse Practices Summit, writes with a smooth and clear-eyed style.
Butcher covers neuroscience, vision, how horses learn, and she offers up a variety of best practices insights, from understanding horse pain (results drawn from an interesting, to the say the least, study), ownership, care, hay, hoof abscesses, and dentistry. Power tools for cleaning horse teeth? Maybe not a great idea. Butcher grounds her insights in research or quotes experts and studies throughout.
The last third of Horse Head offers a smorgasbord of essays, reflections, and interviews. In more than a few instances, Butcher gets up close and personal in relevant and revealing stories from her own experiences with human- and horse-related relationships. There are tales from horse rides, an interview with New York Times reporter David Phillips on the difficult issue of managing the wild horse population, and you’ll meet a straight-talking burro named Wise Ass Wallace.
Butcher closes with a thoughtful essay, “Beasts of Being,” that urges riders and handlers to be in the moment and very “present” around horses. “Engaging with horses for any prolonged period of time becomes an earned partnership. With horses, we learn about respect, trust, consistency, and boundaries,” she writes. “It’s very much a two-way deal and, therefore, it’s more valuable. It’s a relationship that’s harder to obtain and maintain than one with a dog or a cat.”
Packed with scientific nuggets, and laced with a gentle humor, Horse Head makes a convincing case that horses should be understood as the creatures they are—not something we want them to be.
So begins Horse Head—Brain Science & Other Insights by Maddy Butcher (with Dr. Steve Peters), a book that asks us to stop anthropomorphizing the hell out of the horse and to start seeing and understanding this animal on its own terms.
“We make horse actions personal and emotionally complex,” writes Butcher. “He likes kisses. He needs his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Look, he’s nodding ‘yes.’ We’re friends. He loves me! It’s fun but it’s wrong. Of course, horses DO have feelings, motivations, and goals. But from a scientific point of view, they’re much more basic than ours. They want to move. They want to forage. They want to rest. They want to be with other horses.”
Loaded with insights into brain science, Horse Head takes off from there, exploring all aspects of horse behavior and horse mentality. Butcher, the founder and director of the Best Horse Practices Summit, writes with a smooth and clear-eyed style.
Butcher covers neuroscience, vision, how horses learn, and she offers up a variety of best practices insights, from understanding horse pain (results drawn from an interesting, to the say the least, study), ownership, care, hay, hoof abscesses, and dentistry. Power tools for cleaning horse teeth? Maybe not a great idea. Butcher grounds her insights in research or quotes experts and studies throughout.
The last third of Horse Head offers a smorgasbord of essays, reflections, and interviews. In more than a few instances, Butcher gets up close and personal in relevant and revealing stories from her own experiences with human- and horse-related relationships. There are tales from horse rides, an interview with New York Times reporter David Phillips on the difficult issue of managing the wild horse population, and you’ll meet a straight-talking burro named Wise Ass Wallace.
Butcher closes with a thoughtful essay, “Beasts of Being,” that urges riders and handlers to be in the moment and very “present” around horses. “Engaging with horses for any prolonged period of time becomes an earned partnership. With horses, we learn about respect, trust, consistency, and boundaries,” she writes. “It’s very much a two-way deal and, therefore, it’s more valuable. It’s a relationship that’s harder to obtain and maintain than one with a dog or a cat.”
Packed with scientific nuggets, and laced with a gentle humor, Horse Head makes a convincing case that horses should be understood as the creatures they are—not something we want them to be.
Displaying 1 of 1 review