FAQs
FAQs
Here are some of the clarification questions people have asked in response to our article, with our replies. We’ll keep adding as seems warranted.
Q: You mention dogs being eaten by humans but not having a “prey” relationship to us. But isn’t that because dogs are not an actual “prey species”? Whereas horses are?
A: Change “dog” to “cow” and see how the argument works. Castrated male cows are oxen, and oxen have pulled plows and wagons for centuries. In fact, oxen have been considered far more docile and calm with respect to humans than even horses are. Yet human beings have killed and eaten cows for at least as long as they’ve killed and eaten horses. And cows are certainly a “prey species”. (It’s true that rodeos have bucking bulls that show aggression toward humans, but tractable dairy cows and oxen are far more common worldwide. A crucial factor here is the difference between cows and castrated bulls on one hand, and bulls on the other. This is an entirely different issue than the one of “predator species” and “prey species.”)
Q: But horses are still a “prey species”. Doesn’t that make a difference to the argument? Doesn’t that matter in terms of their behavior being inherently more anxious and prone to panic?
A: That view reads a lot of value judgment into the concept of “prey”. We could just as easily argue that a “prey species” has constant and easy access to food (grass and other plants) and so doesn’t have to worry about where its next meal will come from. And we could reason that a “predator species” always has to be looking to find an animal and then successfully catch and kill it to eat, which isn’t easy. If we looked at predators and prey that way, we could make an argument that horses are therefore naturally calm and relaxed whereas predators are inherently edgy and anxious. This argument is no more scientifically valid than the argument that because horses are potential “prey” they are scared and insecure. There are both “good” and “bad” points to being predators and to being prey, and neither biologists nor the organisms themselves attach the values to these states that the general human public does.
Q: But humans are aggressive, and when men remember that their aggression comes from us being predators they treat horses, as well as women and children, more gently. So the model works, and that’s what matters.
A: Aggression is not the same as predation. After all, horses can be aggressive too. It’s good for people, women as well as men, to understand that no one — horse or human — likes to be subjected to overt aggression. Excessive aggression is even abusive. But predation is, by biological definition, the killing and consumption (eating) of another animal. That’s not the same as aggression. It can be a metaphor for aggression (saying we “made a killing” in the stock market, for instance), but a metaphor is literary, not scientific. We need not to confuse the two. And while it’s nice that the predator-prey metaphor of horse-human relationship has helped some people relate less aggressively to their horses, we think it’s important to point out that the model IS a metaphor rather than a “fact” of evolutionary science.
Q: Let’s go back to mountain lions. They do jump down on horses in the wild and bite the back of their necks to kill them. How do we know predators in the past didn’t also do this?
A: As much as we think this is how mountain lions kill horses, a look at the horse’s skeleton and body structure will show you it’s simply not possible. A horse’s neck bone skeleton bends inside the neck in such a way that it’s not near the surface of the neck at all. In this image, you can see that it’s in about the middle of the neck — swathed inside massive muscles and the nuchal ligament, in the area where a mountain lion or other big cat could reasonably be expected to get hold of it from a position on the horse’s back. The red line shows how deep it lies in that area — how much “neck” is between the spinal cord there and the surface of the skin. The only place the neck bones are anywhere near the crest of the neck is the region just behind the ears — and even then it’s buried under several inches of thick muscle and hide (indicated by the blue line). Further, the vertebrae in that region are massive (to hold up the heavy head) and protect the spinal cord in that region with what is essentially armor. And of course, it’s the spinal cord — marked by green dots — that is supposedly severed in a neck-kill-bite. A mountain lion or other predator that could get a good, solid bite into a horse’s neck in that region would wind up with a mouth full of muscle tissue only — no spinal cord.