Peace Lessons From A War Horse

Could you teach a peace-loving and exquisitely sensitive animal to carry you across a battlefield into enemy fire? What would that teach you? a true story…

- Allan J. Hamilton, MD

I have spent my professional life as a brain surgeon, while my main avocation has been training horses. As a neuroscientist, I know how hard it is to overcome our deeply engrained thought patterns because they reflect the ways our brains are hardwired to default to instinctive responses. But I have also learned how much horses have to teach us about changing those thought patterns and reactions. My grandfather, who helped raise me, was a World War I cavalry officer with a horse named Otto, and then a dressage rider—so horses were key to his survival, as well as to his expression as an athlete and artist. He taught me that one of the biggest obstacles horse trainers face is that, as human beings—at our core— we are all so fundamentally predatory.

In my grandfather’s time a cavalry officer was symbolic of the über predator—something very different from the way most of us see ourselves. But he would argue that he was less self-deceived than most people. Our eyes are in front, our teeth are sharp, and we are all instinctively driven to look for the reward, to scrap with whatever assets we have to get it, and to throw as many obstacles and create as many setbacks for any opponent who stands in our way. No species has been more successful at getting what it wants than Homo sapiens. If he were alive, my grandfather would point out that our predatory nature today is literally killing our planet, and what we desperately need to do is to honestly confront ourselves as predators.

A life around horses taught him that— and he was a much better person for those lessons. Let me explain.