As crisis, conflict and control continue to dominate our world, sending ripples of unease and anxiety across continents, we are in need of saner, wiser, more compassionate ways of being.
Like many of us fortunate enough to work with animals, I am often given a different perspective on how best to conduct myself in times of crisis and distress.
When our Dartmoor pony Tinker first injured her eye, I was appalled at the damage and took immediate action to call the emergency vet. His prognosis was matter of fact. It was one of the worst injuries he had ever seen, he said. He was professionally curious. He took photographs. Then he told me with regret: she will probably lose her eye.
Believing in the seriousness of the situation, I accepted it. As the vet said, Tinker could live a perfectly happy life with one eye. If this was what needed to happen, we would do everything we could to ensure it was as straightforward as possible and given that we had no stable for her at the time, it required some flexible thinking.
I spent weeks thinking of the worst case scenario, preparing for inevitable surgery. As I cleaned and treated her eye twice daily, Tinker and I became closer. This was unexpected. She had been sedated for the examination, which involved injecting green dye into her eye to show the extent of the injury, and the vet was sceptical about her ability to tolerate treatment. She looks wild, he said. You may have to twitch her to put in the antibiotic. I won’t be there to sedate her every time.
Twitching involves using a piece of twine to twist around a nose or lip or ear. It’s supposed to release a flood of endorphins so that the horse or pony takes their mind off what might be happening elsewhere in their body. I have seen twitching and what it looks like to me is the infliction of extreme pain. I said to myself: we will find another way.
I asked Tinker to help me. At first she was not impressed with having ropes of yellow gunge cleaned from her eye two or three times daily, and she was sceptical about the need for a fly mask. I let her know each time that I came with the best of intentions. I spoke with her and explained everything I was about to do. I used diluted lavender oil to smooth into her forelock to keep the flies away. I took my time. She accepted the soft new turquoise fly mask I bought for her. Sometimes after treatment, I simply stood with her and meditated, breathing in time with her. I let her know that all she needed to do was heal.
Soon she started to come to me when I entered the field with all my cleaning and treatment kit. She would lower her head so softly and push her nose into the halter, that often, inexplicably, I would be in tears. What had started as a practical preparation for surgery had become something more profound. Her eye was still clouded across most of the surface. Two or three vet visits confirmed that things were getting better, but progress was slow. Removing Tinker’s eye was still an option.
We continued with the daily treatment for weeks and I began to notice small improvements. In certain lights, Tinker’s eye seemed to recover some of her old sparkle. I began to wonder whether it might simply heal. Two vets who assessed the injury said it was unlikely.
Tinker began to relax so deeply into the treatment, I also began to wonder whether she was trying to show me something. There was a quality to her presence in these times I could not ignore. It is hard to put into words, but the feeling tone that came across from her was around surrender. Her whole being seemed to be surrendering to healing. As a wild animal, her system has an inbuilt healing capacity. I believe that she was trying to slow things down so that I didn’t book her in for surgery before she had given herself the best chance to heal.
Six months later Tinker’s eye is clear. It glows in the autumn sunlight. She is at ease and our connection through all those weeks of learning together is also strong and clear. The last time Tinker saw the vet, he said her recovery was a miracle. This is not the kind of language you expect from vets, and even though I smiled at his declaration, in my heart I know that her recovery was not a miracle. It was not supernaturally rare.
What happened was commonplace, the course of nature doing precisely what it knows how to do. For us this was extraordinary because it meant letting go of the expected. Once I decided to follow the pony’s lead on how to approach her injury, there was a subtle shift in our dynamic. Instead of merely treating her, I let her guide me towards what she needed. And the healing unfolded all by itself.
Human intervention is often healing. It is often the opposite. The key to knowing what to do is to ask the injured what they need. Ask the wounded to tell us what to do. Ask the hurting ones to direct us and guide us. We don’t do this enough.
Horsemanship for Health 