Horses have always captivated Sarah Maslin Nir. Yes, she’s a horse girl. The love is so real that she wrote a book all about them. It’s called “Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love With an Animal.”
Here’s a piece of her work, as published in The New York Times:
Taming a horse, gentling it, or, crudely, breaking it, involves messaging more than anything. A horse may be 1,200 pounds — so huge that no amount of force a human could use can truly push it around. Horses are ridable at all, in a way that, say, lions and tigers are not, in large part, I believe, because equines are prey animals, bound to the herd. Horses are genetically inclined to accept a boss.
The phrase “broke to ride” used to mean the animal’s spirit was broken so the shell left behind would submit to human will. In modern equitation, the process is something more like recalibration, convincing a horse that you run the show. Done well, submission is rebranded as alliance; the mount and rider, a herd of two.
And she’s walking the horse girl walk, even recently.
i called @SarahMaslinNir to chat about horses for a future show and it turned out she was at a horse show! here’s a facetime screenshot from what was definitely the coolest pre-interview ever: pic.twitter.com/Wi4Cx9xjzO
— Arfie Ghedi (@awrfie) July 29, 2020
We’re talking with her about what she learned about why we love horses so much.
Copyright 2021 WAMU 88.5. To see more, visit WAMU 88.5. 9(MDIwMjIxMDA0MDE0Mzk4NDIzNjA0OGQ5Yg001))