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Greetings!
Sunday morning, January 8, CBS aired a special on the making of War Horse, from page, to stage, to screen. According to the special, it's believed that ten million horses died in World War I. This is an astounding number. It includes not only the horses that (who) died in actual battles, but also horses that (who) died of disease, starvation, injury, cold, and yes, those who were slaughtered to feed humans before and after the war. Producer Steven Spielberg said about the making of the movie, "I see it as a story about the connections that an animal can make, that perhaps only an animal can make, to bring people together...." view CBS special
Even if you're not a horse lover, it's hard to escape equines this year. When I opened up the March 2012 issue of Cowboys and Indians, there were dozens of images of horses, including "Escaramuza Rider," this award-winning action photo by photographer Winifred Simon. The woman rider is part of an escaramuza team, and the photo was taken during a charreada (Mexican rodeo) near Austin, Texas. When you watch the Latino video, Escaramuza: Riding from the Heart, showing these young women performing sidesaddle, and as you hear them speaking about their traditions, you will understand the ancestral legacy these women uphold. Of course, we expect to see pictures of horses in Cowboys and Indians, but what about Tonk?
Tonk is the 17-hand, 1800 lb draft horse who helped Erin Bolster, a wrangler for Swan Mountain Outfitters in Montana, save a young boy from a charging grizzly bear. What makes this story amazing is that the predator/prey relationship between horse and bear means that Tonk had to have astounding faith in Erin in order to overcome his instinct to flee (for the barn, like all the other horses had done, including the horse the boy's father was riding). Tonk not only turned and faced the grizzly twice, but he actually charged the bear. The video of Erin and Tonk on the David Letterman Show tells the whole story and is well worth the watch.
 Steven Spielberg was fascinated with the War Horse story because of the connections an animal, and perhaps only an animal, can make to bring people together. What qualities do horses have that allow us to communicate in ways we might otherwise not be able to do? What is it like to view the world through the eyes of a horse? What stories do horses hold inside them? I've been asking myself this question since I first rode our family's paint horse Bingo as a toddler, and I have explored it through writing for the last twenty years. The first story about a horse that I ever read in front of a large audience (at Higbee's Cafe in Sundace) was "Redy's Foal," part of a manuscript that won a Literary Fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council, and is Chapter 30 in my Wyoming memoir In Search of Kinship (reprinted in the anthology Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West). A story about my old mare, Romie, and the unborn foal our young paint mare Redy miscarries, it is also a story about the relationship between a man and a woman, about the moral choices we make, and about how our lives are brought together, and pulled apart, by the animals in our lives.
Although it's not a new release, I just finished reading Out Stealing Horses (Per Petterson, Graywolf Press), which won the $133,000 IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD and was named the best book of 2007 by the New York Times Book Review. It's a "quiet" novel, perhaps one of a handful of quiet novels in the last five years to gain such East Coast recognition (and I confess, my first e-book reading experience). The novel is far more about the relationship between men, than it is about horses, yet the horse forms a metaphorical connection that spans decades. "We were going out stealing horses," Chapter 2 begins, "That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948... Three years earlier the Germans had left...my father never said anything about the war."
How did the death of 10 million horses in World War I affect the human psyche? What cellular memory haunts our great grandparents? And how many horses died in World War II, or became obsolete with the mechanization of war? In 1930, Dorothy Brooke, the wife of a British army major general, discovered hundreds of emaciated, walking skeletons on the streets of Cairo, Egypt. She learned they were ex-warhorses of the British, Australian and American forces, sent to India as beasts of burden. In 1934, she established the "Old War Horse Memorial Hospital." She bought 5,000 of these old war horses and though many had to be euthanized, many were saved. The Brooke is still in operation today, working to preserve the health and happiness of working horses, mules, and donkeys.
 If you are drawn to survivor stories, perhaps you've followed the inspiring story of Neville Bardos, the Australian-born Thoroughbred chestnut gelding who's throat was severly burned in a horrific fire last May. Six of his stablemates were burned to death. His owner, Boyd Martin, bought him for $850 to prevent him from being sold for slaughter, and the horse not only survived the fire, but was just named Horse of the Year by the United States Equestrian Federation and is an Olympic contender (read Mary Pilon's 1/12/12 article in the New York Times). Watch a January 16th video of Neville performing only 7 months after this horrific fire.
 I first met plein air painter Susan Bell a few years ago, outside the bison pens at the National Western Stock Show. Susan lives, breathes and talks horses. Her longtime love affair with animals began at a young age. "In what's now the heart of Denver, there was a field with a stable where we kept our horses," she recalls. "I'd be dropped off in the morning and picked up at night. I really got to know horses and found them to be more individual than people." You'll find her painting "WarHorse" in the Animal Gallery on her website.
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