It is always unwise and unwarranted to ascribe to non-human species human emotions. We simply don’t know that non-humans – from monkeys to dogs to cats to cows to parrots to snakes to fish to worms to Antifa members – actually feel the emotions we do, in the way we do. But there are times when it is very, very hard to deny that they sure *seem* to. We’ve all seen dogs who do damnably fine simulations of happiness and sadness and the like. I saw another example today of just such a thing.
As previously mentioned, my left shoulder is a mess. I’ve found that driving seems to help; I assume that part of it is taking my mind off the pain, and part is due to the fact that with my hand on the wheel, a good fraction of the weight of the arm is taken off the shoulder. Whatever, I found myself driving around a bit today. And not far from home I saw chaos on the road ahead… several vehicles pulled over, police lights, lots of motion. As I got closer I saw that the issue was a half dozen or so horses running around freely; in short, someone had left a gate open and the horses had bolted, and efforts were underway to collect them.
A frame from a brief and terrible-quality cell phone video I shot of the horses running around. Seethe mountains in the background? Yeah, me neither. Air quality still sucks.
The horses were running as a group through the snow-covered fields. They were not running to escape; they were running just to run. Horses were evolved for the purpose, and when they are prevented from running and suddenly the opportunity presents itself… they run. To all appearances, they run for the pure joy of it. When I first moved to my place here in Utah back in 2004, the neighbors had themselves a horse that they kept in a *tiny* pen. For a creature with minimal ability to make facial expressions, it sure as heck looked depressed. Soon after, the fencing around my back four or so acres was fixed up and I let them keep the horse in that field. Upon first being moved from that tiny pen to my field… the horse ran. And ran. And ran. It ran the perimeter; it ran from corner to corner. It covered every square foot just as fast as it could, because it could.
Running, it seems, gives horses joy. Because that’s what they are for.
Mandatory political analysis: recognition that doing what you’re made to do makes you happy, and not doing it makes you sad, might be an explanation for a lot of the trouble in the world today, especially among men. Men who started off as boys who were trained (and often drugged) to not act like boys, who grew up to be ashamed of being male and masculine and to despise their nation, their culture and their ethnicity and to feel nothing but shame and guilt.
