E.S.P. AND WEEPING ROGER

Early in our researches we realised that the air and manner of the horse when he was delivering a message was all-important to interpreting what he was trying to say. But we quickly discovered also that there was more than this to the way we were receiving messages from'our animals. It was not just the air and manner of delivery that was giving us the clues. There were also times when we knew instinc­tively the meaning of the message. And even when we could not see or hear the horse, we found that in times of stress ot difficulty we could feel the uneasiness and know that something was wrong. Over and over again, when we went to see what was the matter, something was wrong.

Funnily enough the first time this happened after we had started on our research into animal communication, it was not a horse but a cow that was involved. Normally I sleep like a log and do not hear anything, but on this night I woke up with this powerful feeling that something was amiss, and went out to the animals. The cow was calving, but it was a breech delivery so she was in difficulties. Thinking about it afterwards, I worked out that I had been awakened by the feeling that something was wrong; and been drawn sub-consciously to where the cow was. This started me thinking in a new direction and, step by step, I came to the somewhat startling conclusion that I could feel the moods of the horses rather than see or hear them. This faculty is what we call extra-sensory perception, perception outside the range of our normal five senses. And we re­alised that animals can use this faculty to convey moods, emotions and certain limited ideas. Since it is used in con­junction with other forms of communication – sounds and signs –it can be compared with the air and manner of delivery of speech in a human being; but it is more than this, because you know the mood and feel it within your­self., If a horse is excited, you feel it, and the horse will feel it when you are depressed and this is a matter of instinct rather than visual, aural or tactile perception.

This is the part of our work about which there is considerable controversy. I have been warned that entry into so highly contentious an area may tend to devalue our work on animal communication as a whole, in the eyes of the academic world. I have often been told that while our work on signs and sounds is far in advance of anything anybody else has done, our involvement with animal extra-sensory perception makes us suspect – even puts us in the same class as charlatans and music-hall acts! For scientists have been arguing for the past fifty years about whether extra­sensory perception exists or not: who are we to rush in where scholars fear to tread, and claim to have proved not only that it does exist, but that it exists among animals and is an integral part of their communication?

However, I must stand by my own view. The scepticism of some scientists does not of itself invalidate my con­clusions. Until Faraday started his work with frogs and the single-cell battery, no doubt a section of the scientific world said that electricity did not exist, for any new field of research has been looked upon with suspicion by the scientific conservatives. We are absolutely convinced by our own experience that e.s.p. does exist, and we have proved, to our own satisfaction any way, that it does. We know that we cannot have complete communication with horses without using e.s.p. We know that horses use it in communicating with each other. Therefore we must con­tinue our researches into it, and I would be in-sincere if I did not deal with it in my account of the work we have done with horses. In fact, to carry out research into equine com­munication without taking into account e.s.p. and tele­pathy would be equivalent to trying to study English by studying only the nouns and verbs and pretending that adverbs and adjectives did not exist. Since our work is primary research and not secondary research, we have to study eqiu'ne communication as a whole, not its parts. Sub­sequent researchers may, for example, be able to do more detailed studies on the use of sounds or signs or e.s.p. alone, but they will have the work we and other researchers have done into communication as a whole to give their detail a context.

A further area of argument about our work on e.s.p. with horses, even among those who do not totally reject the idea, has been around the degree of unconscious perception in­volved. When you are perceiving consciously, the argu­ment runs, you can consciously see, hear and understand the signs and sounds made by a horse. But you also ex­ercise a certain amount of unconscious perception: that is, without consciously knowing you are doing it, you see and hear certain things which help you understand the message which the horse is trying to convey. The charge is that we are confusing, to whatever extent, unconscious perception with extra-sensory perception. Now we have always re­alised that in a large number of cases this may be so, be­cause when you are handling a horse, you do unconsciously observe and anticipate what he is going to do, and you do tend to put your understanding down to 'instinct'. Equally, no doubt, a herd of horses will realise unconsciously what you are feeling simply from your facial expression, your movement and the way you carry yourself. This is all un­conscious perception, and we know that it is, but since it is not conscious we have, rightly or wrongly, included it under e.s.p., since we find it extremely difficult to set an exact border line between the unconscious and true e.s.p. There is of course room for considerable research here, and we may find when this has been done that we have mistaken a very large amount of unconscious perception for e.s.p. We are not really concerned at present – though we will be later – with whether unconscious perception is a fifth means of cornrnunication or not. Our research from the beginning has been very much a question of following a path to see where it goes. All the experimental work we have done on e.s.p. has in any case been designed in such a way that it can be duplicated at a later date by other people in other places, so that our own work can be verified, and anyone doing later research into equine communication has some standard experiments to carry out before he goes on to experimental work of his o\vn design. We hope that this will be done time and time again, and that once sufficient work has been done in the field of signs and sounds, systematic experiments will be carried out on e.s.p.

We have done some experiments specifically on e.s.p., one of which was a feeding experiment carried, out between two horses who had no visible or audible contact with each other; but we cannot be absolutely certain that our horses' sense of hearing does not allo\v them to pick up distant sounds unconsciously, and even less can we be certain that part of equine communication is not the unconscious per­ception of certain sounds that are normally considered to be inaudible. We are led to believe by other scientific re­search that horses' hearing is much the same as ours and that the horse does not hear ultrasonic sounds: that is, previous scientific experiments on horses have shown no reaction to ultrasonic sounds. On the other hand it is quite possible that there are certain sounds which are inaudible to us, which a horse will hear unconsciously, though we do not think that this is so. On the other hand it is not without significance that in our experiments we did not get any conclusive results except with what we call em-pathic pairs.

The point is that any horse cannot communicate men­tally with any other horse, just as any human being cannot communicate mentally with any other human being. It is only if you are very close to someone that you may be able to sense what they are feeling without seeing them and talking to them. When two horses are mentally and emotionally on the same wavelength, then they too can sense what the other is thinking and what the other- is doing.

Now it is common practice for a horse handler, faced with a very frightened or nervous horse, to use another horse that is confident and relaxed to give the anxious one confidence and relax him. We very often get sent a bunch of seven or eight three- and four-year-old cobs, horses and ponies which have never been handled and are completely wild, and we use one of two ways to get them settled and quiet. One is to approach the most settled cob in a quiet way and get him quiet, so that slowly the other horses in the bunch will become settled too, in tune with the horse we are handling. The second method, which we use more often, is to put the wild ponies in the stable together with one or two of our own horses. We leave them for half-an-hour to get accustomed to each other, then we go in to them. They will belt around the stable trying to get away from us, but our own horse will come over to talk,-and we talk to him and feed him a few horse nuts, and we can then feel the others becoming gradually more relaxed. He will give them confidence in us and confidence in themselves.

Now it is obvious that the wild horses relax a certain amount from the example of the other horse. But we have found that we can do exactly the same thing with hones that are out of sight and sound of each other, if the two horses are an empathic pair, that is, if they are mentally in tune with each other. We can settle one horse by relaxing the other, or make one horse excited by exciting his com­panion.

This is one of our standard experiments. But it is in fact based on a trick as old as man's contact with horses. One of the earliest books on breaking horses for harness instructs you to take a colt and couple him to an old horse who will teach the young one to work. This method of horse-train­ing has been used for hundreds of years. The South Am­erican ganchos, when they want to control a herd of horses, turn an old mare out with them and put a bell on her. The other horses will follow the old mare, and she will get them going quietly and steadily. The gauchos can then find the herd by the bell, and the old mare will make it possible to drive the young horses into a corral.

My early memories of seeing horses broken at home include seeing Black Beauty, our pony, always in attend­ance 'as a schoolmaster' to tell the others what to do. Those were my father's words: he said that Beauty had to be there to tell the young horses what to do, and for some fifteen years we used Cork Beg for the same purpose. The older horse settles the younger horse and the young horse will imitate his senior. When a young horse is being asked to do something new his first reaction is to say 'I can't.' Seeing another horse do it will show him that it is not impossible, but seeing another horse can do it does not necessarily con­vince him that he can, so he may still say ^!I can't.' How­ever, if he can feel the other horse enjoying himself he will want to enjoy the experience too, and that IS where extra­sensory perception comes in.

'Welcome': the author's greeting from his horse

'I love you

'I'm boss': the grey tries to overtake the herd leader

'Go back': the herd leader gives the grey a nip to send him back into line

'Go away, I'll pulverize you

'I'm hungry': foal approaches mother

'Mummy loves you, you'll be quite safe'

Come and drink

Emphatic pairs

'Go away, I'm a good girl': the mare refuses the stallion

'I like you': he approaches another

'Let's make love

'You'll be quite safe with me': he reassures her

And she complies: 'Come on then!'

The author's gentle method of training

Catching a horse by making him come to you: the author leads the horse with a bucket of food

Calming a frightened or hostile horse, first by gentling with the voice: the author approaches, talking quietly to the horse in a sing-song voice

Using finger-tips - he gets near enough to caress the horse with the tips of the fingers, simulating the mother's muzzle reassuring a foal

Now he uses the palm of the hand to suggest the pressure of another horse's head

Then he leans over the horse's neck, imitating the reassurance of the presence of another horse

'Where's my bloody breakfast?'

The author's wife, Leslie, takes a cross-country fence on 'Rostellan'

E.s.p. between animals is not a conscious mental process, it is an unconscious process and to a certain extent it is an automatic reflex. If an old hunter hears the sound of a hunting horn and hounds in full cry in the distance, he will become excited. This is because he associates the sound of the hunting horn and the cry of the hounds with being excited. But if he has a companion with him who has never heard hounds and does not know what a hunting horn means, the companion will become excited because the old horse is excited, without knowing why. The old horse's excitement is an automatic reflex and the young horse's excitement too is an automatic response. If you go into a stable and frighten a horse, his empathic companion, even though he may be out of sight and out of hearing, will also show signs of being frightened.

An empathic pair is simply a pair of horses mentally and emotionally close to each other, and the phenomenon comes about in one of two ways. Two horses may simply find themselves automatically in tune with each other from the first time they meet. These will probably be of the same breed and type. Or alternatively, they may become men­tally in tune with each other through close and constant companionship. They will initially think roughly upon the same mental lines, but by close association they will attain complete empathy. If you get two thoroughbreds and turn them out with a herd of ponies, they will in most cases tend to graze together, probably away from the ponies, and in time they will become an empathic pair. Or if you have a mare and a gelding and turn them out together for a long period^ perhaps several years, they too may in time think as one.

A truly empathic pair is a pair of horses who literally think as one, the perfect union. The nearest analogy I can think of is that of a pair of tuning forks. If you strike one tuning fork, it will hum, and if you put an exactly similar tuning fork beside it that will also begin to hum, in unison. If the second fork is not exactly similar – that is, it makes note D while the original is an E – the response will be less marked. And the further the second fork is from the note of the original tuning fork, the less the responding tuning fork will hum. So it is with e.s.p. and empathy: if you apply a stimulus to one horse of an empathic pair, the other, even though he is not in physical contact, will respond too. The less the sympathy between the two horses – the further from an empathic pair – the less the response will be, until two horses which are not in mental communication at all will make no response whatever!

I had my first experience of this phenomenon when I was quite young. Along with Beauty we had other ponies, and one pony we had for a very long time was called Bill the Baby. When Bill did not want to be caught, we could not catch Beauty, and countless times I have driven Beauty and Bill into the corner of the field to try to catch them. I would approach them, and they would be standing quietly and quite happily looking at me, until I got to within five or ten yards of them, and then, without any signal I could see at all, one would shoot to the left of me and the other to the right of me, and on no occasion did they both try to go the same way. They would always start at exactly the same instant, so that there was no possible way of stopping them, and it was a good twenty years before I realised how they did it. I used to spend hours and hours trying to work out the signals that they were giving, so that I could stop them beforehand, but I never could. I can read those signals to a certain extent now, but now I know enough never to corner a horse ii I want to catch it. I always make him come to me.

There is still a great deal of work to be carried out into exactly how one horse communicates with another horse using e.s.p., and into how a human being can communicate mentally with a horse or–with another human being. Equally, we know little about why one person has this faculty and not another. The Russians and Americans have done a lot of work on e.s.p. and telepathy between human beings, mainly on telepathy, which is by far the less common phenomenon. But there has been very little work done on e.s.p. between animals, apart from our own. And we, I must emphasise, have only scratched the surface of the subject. We have researched only into communication between horse and horse, and horse and man. But we have found that if one is to do any animal-communication re­search, it is essential to concentrate in the beginning on one animal, and it must be an animal that has been selected as the one you are naturally mentally in tune with. Equally, if you are carrying out research into communication between two horses, it is essential to get two horses of similar breed­ing and type, and two horses that are naturally mentally in tune with each other.

We can sometimes find two horses with a natural em­pathy when we go to a sale; if we see two horses which come from different places yet are immediately friendly to each other, and start whickering and talking to each other, we know these two horses are mentally in tune. Normally, if you walk down the line of horses at a horse sale, you will see that most of the horses are standing in apparent mental and physical isolation from the horses on either side. But just occasionally you will see two horses, usually of similar type and breeding, who are acting in a friendly way and talking to each other. These are likely to be a naturally empathic pair.

In the wild, when a strange horse approaches, the natural reaction of the herd is to reject it; and to begin with, even a domesticated horse, if you introduce a strange horse to it, will react by snapping at him or telling him to bugger off. He will in fact be saying 'this is our home, you get the hell out of here, this is our territory.' This is the natural and automatic reaction of a horse, just as it is with human beings, who tend to reject advances from strangers. As evidence of this, you have only to look at a bunch of people travelling in a railway carriage, each sitting in de­fensive isolation. A naturally empathic pair, however, will drop their reserve at once.

It is only when you have obtained a horse that you think you are mentally in tune with, and obtained a companion horse which is also in tune with him, that you can start your research. You will start by concentrating on trying to com­municate mentally with your subject, and at the same time observing his behaviour with his companion.

The first horse that I knew I had this empathy with was Weeping Roger. I have already briefly described the extra­ordinary circumstances in which I met him, one day in Exeter market. I was just having a look, and talking to a friend of mine, when suddenly behind me I could feel dejection invading my mind and body as if someone or something was screaming 'for God's sake get me out of here.' I turned around, and there was a horse just waiting to go into the ring, a dirty-brown lop-eared half-starved sixteen-two thoroughbred. I just had to buy him. My wife, who was standing some distance away, saw what was going to happen, and, realising that a desperate illness required a desperate remedy, saw a very attractive girl, to whom she had just been introduced. By this time Roger was in the ring, and I was bidding for him. She grabbed this un­fortunate female and dragged her over, hoping to distract me from the horse. The poor girl got one glance from me, 'hello', and I turned my back and went on bidding. For­tunately no one else wanted a lop-eared sixteen-two half-starved thoroughbred and I~got him for Ј40.

I took him home, having learnt he had been on Exmoor all winter (this was the end of February). I put him inside and started stuffing food into him. I took him out hunting with the hounds three or four days later, and he loved it and I hunted him a dozen times more before the end of the season. Then just ten days before the local point-to-point at Cotley, the horse I had been going to ride in the hunt race died. So I entered Roger.

On the day of the point-to-point, I was so ashamed of his condition and appearance that I did not take him out of the lorry until the very last minute, and then took him straight down the paddock, once round, and down to the start. I always had a half-crown bet on the race with my friend Pat Frost, on who would finish first. But this time I had so little confidence in my mount that I made the condition that the loser would have a double scotch afterwards. I thought I was being very smart. There were about a dozen to fifteen horses in the race as far as I can remember, and they were off to a very ragged start, but away we went with me settling Roger down on the tail of the field.

On the Gotley course, you go first about half a mile uphill, then you turn downhill towards the finish, then away uphill again. By the time we got to the top of the hill the first time, I was two lengths behind the last horse, but Roger was going very well, taking his fences with great enthusiasm, and as we went down the hill, I was surprised to find that I was still in reasonable touch with the bulk of the field. Down past the finish, to the bottom of the hill, and away up the hill again – then the horse just in front dropped back past me, and I thought 'well that is good, I will not be last anyway.' Then we passed another horse and another and another. By the time we got to the top of the hill there were only two horses in front of me, and I thought I had better do something more vigorous, since Roger was hardly sweating. So I set him alight, and went in pursuit of the two riders half a fence in front of me, and slowly and remorselessly I found I was catching up with them. Three fences from home, the horse that was lying second fell, and by the time we reached the winning post I was within three lengths of the winner. I just could not believe it, that this skeleton of a horse had beaten some of the best horses in the West Country. Roger literally danced past the winning post, as if he had won the Grand National, his head and tail up and never more than one foot on the ground at a time. We went into the unsaddling enclosure and it took me five minutes to get the saddle off, he was dancing around so much with pride and excitement.

After this I really set about getting him fit to race, for I suspected I had a very good horse indeed. After breakfast each morning I used to take him out for exercise, and since it was very cold weather and I never had gloves with me, I used to put my hands into my pockets and they stayed there until I got home. I would direct him and control him entirely by e.s.p. I could make him trot, walk, turn left, turn right entirely by mental concentration.

Roger had another very useful function. He was a superb nursemaid. My daughter Paddy, who was then about eighteen months old, used to love horses, and the sure way of keeping her quiet and happy was to put her on the straw in Roger's box, and let her play under the manger and around his feet. She learned to walk by pulling herself j. up by his tail, tottering from one leg to another. When she fell down and bumped herself, Roger would blow at her, and she rolled over on her back quite happy again.

But we could never get any condition on him, and we were always ashamed to take ^un racing because he looked so terrible in the paddock, and the only consolation we had was that the worse he looked in the paddock, the better he was going to run. If he stumbled around and looked as though he would have a job to totter down to the start, we knew that he was really going to go that day, and we could get our money on. I won two or three races on him, and I always enjoyed riding him, because he was such a fantastic jumper, and he was so enthusiastic about racing.

Shortly after the Cotley point-to-point, a friend offered to buy him off me for Ј300. I did not want to sell, but I had him vetted anyway, to insure him. The vet, Bill Martin, checked his legs in the stable, then had him out to check his heart while he was standing still. He listened for two seconds and said, 'for God's sake put the bloody thing back into the stable before he drops dead.' Then I listened, and it was the most irregular heartbeat I had ever heard. It sounded like Victor Sylvester giving a dancing lesson, slow, slow, quick-quick, slow, but it was less regular than that, it would beat very very quickly and then very very slowly. How he ever walked, let alone raced, I could not under­stand. But since Bill said that he was as likely to drop dead walking around the field as racing, and the old man loved racing, we decided to go on racing him. When we left Devon to come up to Wales, he was sold for a nominal price to an acquaintance who wanted a horse for his son to start point-to-pointing on, and he ran his last race only eight years later at the Cotley point-to-point, when he was seventeen years old, and came second again.

I was always at one with him. On one occasion he woke me up at three in the morning. I simply knew there was something wrong, and when I went out to have a look at him I found that he was having a violent attack of colic. And once I found I could get through to him, I started trying to get through to other horses, by concentrating all my attention on the horse I was trying to get through to – leaving myself as I put it, on an open line to the horse. And after working at it for about fifteen years I find I can get through to nearly everything, except small ponies.

Mine is not a unique experience. After all, as we have seen, the bond between man and horse goes back to anti­quity, and stories about this bond go back beyond the his­tory of the written word. The story I like best, which seems to express the essence of all the legends about the faithful steed, is that told about a French soldier, during one of Napoleon's battles against the Austrians. He was wounded and lying in a field, when suddenly his horse, which he had not been riding that day because it was lame, appeared beside him, having broken away from the horse lines. The soldier pulled himself up on to its back, and the horse carried him back to his unit, where he was received by his comrades unconscious across the horse's bare back, with­out bridle, halter or saddle.

Man's ability to be at one with the horse is also well illustrated by the story of the American slave who used to catch wild mustangs by going naked into the district where the herd of horses roamed, and live and move as a member of the herd. He would start off by approaching within two or three hundred yards of the herd and just staying there. When the horses moved, he moved with them. When they went to water, he went to water. When they grazed he would lie down beside the grazing herd. He would fetch his own food from a tree a mile or so away from the herd, where it was left for him. Within a fortnight or so he would be moving in amongst the wild horses and be accepted as a member of the herd. Then, when he had established his position he would hal%drive, half-lead the mustangs into an already prepared corral. Simply by acting as a horse acted, thinking as a horse thought, behaving as a horse behaved, ami having no contact with man, he gained the horses' trust and could single-handedly catch a complete herd of wild horses.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 765