Like many people, I’ve long appreciated the peace and renewal that nature offers. But I’ll never forget the day I first glimpsed the benevolence, and highly adaptive intelligence, of the human-animal bond.
In the mid-1990s, I was boarding my horses at a rustic private facility located next to a large desert preserve. While I enjoyed exploring the trails with my experienced cow horse Noche, I also looked forward to quality time with Rasa, who couldn’t be ridden because of a chronic leg injury. Increasingly, the saddle collected dust as I took long walks with my night-haired companion, letting her roam off lead to nibble the dry, nut-flavored grasses as we meandered through a vast, primal landscape. Occasionally, I would also invite my year-old, mixed-breed dog Nala to accompany us, hoping she would soon develop the ability to override her more aggressive instincts and protect, rather than chase, the horses.
Rasa was well suited to assisting me in this task. While other herd members would charge off at a gallop when Nala raced after them, the black mare would trot a few steps and slow down to a walk, shaking her mane in protest, kicking out slightly in warning, but never making contact. Her restraint with Nala seemed intentional: Many times, I had seen Rasa run coyotes out of her pasture, though her actions also had a playful quality to them, as if herding small predators was a hobby she adopted for her own amusement.
One evening just as the sun was slipping below the horizon, the three of us were heading home after a relaxing, uneventful hike. Suddenly, Nala crouched down slightly, narrowed her eyes, and growled. Rasa raised her head and stared in the same direction. Moments later, announced by the sound of rustling leaves and snapping branches, a small yet imposing herd of cattle emerged from a nearby mesquite grove. I wasn’t sure if the animals were merely curious or potentially dangerous, but I couldn’t help focusing on their impressive horns as one of the larger females began to walk toward us with several others falling in formation behind.
At nearly eighty pounds, Nala was not a small dog. Even so, she turned tail, ran straight to me, and huddled against my legs for support, looking up as if to say, “What should we do now?” My only possible herding tool — Rasa’s lead rope — dangled from my shoulder. Just as I was considering whether to stand my ground or carefully walk away, the black horse pinned her ears and lunged toward this rangy bovine contingent. The cows lowered their heads, backed up in synchrony, and turned away. Then, just for good measure, Rasa trotted back and forth in an arc, as if she were drawing a curving line in the sand, creating a protective bubble around Nala and me that was clearly not to be crossed.
I was astonished. Noche was the seasoned cow horse, not Rasa. If anything, I would have expected my dog to rush at the cattle as the mare ran home. For weeks afterward, my brain worked overtime, combining and recombining the “facts” I had learned about the “drama of survival.” Ultimately, I was less confused by Nala’s reticence to attack than by the question of why a herbivore, and a slightly lame one at that, would defend us both.
It took me twenty years to collect research capable of shedding some light on this event. (As in the case of emotional and social intelligence, pivotal studies on animal behavior that seem so obvious now simply weren’t available in the 1990s.) Slowly, bits and pieces of the puzzle were revealed through multiple disciplines, infusing my writing with lots of questions and, thankfully over time, a growing list of answers that eventually allowed me to discern some useful patterns.
In part 1, I summarize and expand upon the most relevant theories and examples I presented in The Power of the Herd — ideas that in some cases challenge our most treasured, tenacious views about nature while foreshadowing a more balanced, mutually supportive approach to power. In the process, we’ll revisit long-held misconceptions about the instinctual behaviors, emotional vitality, and intellectual capacity of all animals, including the talented, sometimes overly aggressive species known as Homo sapiens.
Hidden Revolution
Most people are familiar with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Related research by Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, however, has virtually gone underground. The Russian geographer and naturalist published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. Over the next fifty years, the book was rejected, in some cases actively suppressed, by royalty, fascists, capitalists, and communists alike. Based on a collection of essays and magazine articles he wrote in the late 1800s, Kropotkin’s observations of supportive social behavior in nature struck some corporate and political leaders as “dangerous.” In fact, even before Mutual Aid made it into bookstores, Kropotkin was obliged to put his keen, insightful intellect to other uses, namely figuring out how to escape from jail.
The czarist-era Russian nobleman hadn’t intended to cause so much trouble. Born a prince (though he rejected that title at age fourteen), he had significant connections and resources to draw upon. When Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Kropotkin was inspired to contribute to the scientific literature on this topic. Commandeering a group of ten Cossacks and fifty horses, he trotted off to Siberia, hoping to gather case studies to support and further define the intricacies of evolution. But soon enough, he was confused and disillusioned by what he saw — or perhaps more specifically, by what he didn’t see.
“I failed to find — although I was eagerly looking for it — that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution,” (italics added) Kropotkin wrote on the very first page of Mutual Aid.
He was even more disturbed by the fast-growing relationship between Darwinism and sociology, emphasizing that he “could agree with none of the works and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They all endeavored to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was ‘a law of Nature.’”
In Kropotkin’s experience, this potentially destructive view “lacked confirmation from direct observation.” By then, he had witnessed significant instances of mutual support and competition avoidance in the vast numbers of animals he encountered in the Siberian outback. Bears hibernating, squirrels storing nuts for the winter, and herds of large herbivores languidly migrating were the most obvious examples, but Kropotkin also noticed an even more profound theme emerging.
“The first thing which strikes us is the overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over those few carnivores which do not associate,” he wrote, later adding that on the “great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and wild sheep. All these mammals live in societies and nations sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individuals, although now, after three centuries of gunpowder civilization, we find but the debris of the immense aggregations of the
