#dancing horses

The Super Sailing Studio 6000

After flagging down a passing changeling and sending her to fetch Occupant, Chrysalis and Cherry trotted over to the docks. The closer the barge came, the gaudier it looked, brass and glass and brightly colored paint, as if the whole were a seagoing theater bent on attracting the attention and custom of… who, exactly?

Then, as the barge’s large paddlewheels backed water to bring the craft to a stop by the docks, the wind picked up just enough for the flag on the ship’s stubby mast to flap open, revealing a bright red-and-white FF logo.

“Well, pony, looks like we have been honored,” Chrysalis muttered.

“How do you figure?” Cherry Berry replied.

“The list of people who are bigger deceivers than any changeling is a short one,” Chrysalis said. “This ship belongs to two ponies near the top of that list.” After a moment’s thought she added, “That is, if they bought it legitimately, which I doubt.”

Flim and Flam are here to very casually volunteer their not at all suspicious services, from the fanfic Changeling Space Program.

I’ll straight up admit that I don’t see the majority of his content and also can’t be bothered to go look at it to confirm what I’m about to say and this is going to be based off the what I saw in his arguments the last time him & dancing horses actually popped up on my dash:It’s sort of like watching someone try to explain the fact that if a black hole ever crashed into the Earth, the Earth would be fine but there would be an exit and entry point (like a bullet wound) but not quite Get It™. (The hyperlink/bad analogy is literally a cool thing I learned about that was NOT caused by a black hole crashing into the Earth but which caused me to learn what that might do theoretically and I wanted to share that).

So here’s the thing--- he’s not wrong about having to look at it in a cultural context. If you’re trying to look at it from an academically minded viewpoint and learn what their rationales for training in that manner is then you absolutely need to get rid of any biases and ethnocentric views. You’d need to learn it from the view of the people doing it. If you’re trying to look at why they’re doing it that way versus why they’ve not adopted another way, then you also have to look from a culturally mindful perspective. Especially if you’re trying to effect change and get them to adopt methods that are not abusive. You simply cannot change adverse cultural practices when coming in from the viewpoint that they’re Wrong and you’re Right (even if ethically that might be true). People shutdown when they’re being attacked, especially so if what they’re being attacked over is ingrained in their culture. Instead of being an attack on the practice, it turns into an attack on the culture. There are plenty of cultures that aren’t Bad that have Bad Practices and we can only change them through learning about them and empowering them with education to make ethical decisions. 

A great example of how to effect ethical change in a culture whose traditional practices are abusive practices is the Friends of Marwar/Kathiwari Horse organization and what it’s done to replace harsh, crudely constructed Indian bits with snaffles. They also work overall to educate about horse welfare and proper horse care in India, including being partnered with Flying Anvil Foundation (which focuses on bringing updated farrier techniques to the areas of the world that are still dependent on traditional farming and truly agricultural use of horses). What both organizations have in common is that they are aiming to correct very clear abusive/neglect by approaching it from the standpoint that it exists from a lack of education. They go in, they educate, and people adopt these proper care methods and non-abusive techniques/tools because ultimately these people do care about their horses--- even if they only care about maximizing the usefulness of the horse. That last bit there about the “usefulness of the horse” is also something really key to operating effectively in outreach work aimed at improving the condition of any animal that a culture is subsisting off of. You cannot change cultural views with a snap of your finger, so if you enter into a culture that only views the animal as a tool and not in the same Western concept of a companion--- then you need to implement a strategy that focuses on logos versus pathos. (Quick terminology lessons: Logos, Ethos, & Pathos are rhetoric terms that originated from Aristotle and describe the method by which you’re arguing a thesis ((thesis being used in it’s original context to mean a “point of view” or proposition)). Logos is an appeal to logic. Ethos is an appeal to ethics. Pathos is an appeal to emotion. When operating across cultural lines, you generally do not rely on ethos because what is considered ethical is not standard across cultures. You rely on logos and pathos either solely or interchangeably as necessary.)So, if you’re dealing with people who want to do what’s best for their horse because they also care for the horse as pet--- then you can focus more on pathos and use arguments like “if you use this snaffle instead of this traditional bit, it will be softer and cause your horse less pain which will make him happier and more responsive!”If you’re dealing with people who want to do what’s best for their horse only so long as it maximizes the use of the horse--- then you need to focus more on logos and use arguments like “if you use this snaffle instead of this traditional bit then you won’t cause sores and cuts in the horses mouth, and a if the horse is not in pain then it can work longer and if the horse doesn’t have open wounds then it won’t get infections in those wounds that could kill it or mean it wouldn’t be able to work; so by using this snaffle you can get more use out of your horse.”

However, where I’ve seen TMFCK go “wrong” in his arguments or defenses is that he’s not getting past looking at it from what ethnographers call an “insider’s perspective” and applying an “outsider’s perspective”. By only pointing out the the fact that the training is orally passed down and whatever else about it as a means to explain the why there is the abusive practice is only doing half the work. You need to look at the WHY (insider’s perspective) but also the HOW (outsider’s perspective)--- so let me give you my favorite example from an ethnographer about how to apply looking at it from both perspectives because it’s the most chilling:In Brazil, specifically I think it was the capital, within an extremely impoverished community there was an astronomically high infant mortality rate. Going in and studying why this was happening, an ethnographer discovered this was due to something that she translated roughly as “the breath for life”. When a child was born, the practice within the community was to take the newborn immediately after cutting the umbilical cord and places it in a corner of the room on the floor where they would leave it for something like 3 days. You would not look at the child or feed the child, or cover the child. You’d just leave a newborn crying on the floor for 3 days. Now the cultural explanation for this (WHY/insider’s perspective) was because all children born into the world are reincarnations of souls who’ve already lived. God is apparently very silly and doesn’t keep track of which soul just died very well and you need to wait the 3 days to make sure God didn’t make a mistake. The soul itself needed that much time to alert God that “hey I was just alive!” and needed isolation so that a) God could hear it better and b) to prevent the soul from losing it’s memory of it’s past life (which is what happens to babies so that they don’t have their old memories) so that God could take it back. A baby that lasted the three days was a soul that had “the breath for life” and had spent enough time in Heaven that it was ready to live another human life. So--- from the cultural perspective, they weren’t committing infanticide or doing anything wrong because that’s what was needed to help God out with his bad organizational skills. Now the actual, hard science explanation behind why this was a cultural practice and why people didn’t see anything wrong with it (HOW/outider’s perspective) was that this community was so horrifically impoverished that they could not devote resources to many children at all and couldn’t afford to waste them on infants that wouldn’t survive. The waiting the 3 days before even feeding the child was essentially a form of unintentional eugenics because the infants that would be able to survive it would have strong immune systems and clearly just a strong survival ability. The 3 days thing also mimicked a very real possibility of the children going days without being fed as that was a very real possibility in the community. These children would then be worth devoting precious resources too because it wouldn’t be a waste. Yes, this community was committing infanticide but they were committing infanticide on children that would have likely died anyway and preserving resources that would be valuable in keeping other community members alive. Is it wrong to let a baby die on purpose? Still yes, but at least there was a reasoning behind why that had become a necessary thing.The point is, you need both views of something in order to absolutely fully understand why it is happening. Only with an understanding of it can you remedy it. In the above example you could scream at them to stop leaving babies to die---maybe even get them to stop leaving babies to die, but ultimately those babies still would have died. Knowing that it was a resource problem meant that two viable options to prevent needless baby death would be 1) Give them more resources and/or 2) Introduce them to family planning so we’re only having babies we know we have resources for. Without both aspects of understanding you can’t provide a real solution. 

So, I get what he’s saying and he’s not wrong and he does make good points about racism (or at least he did the last time I saw it and I actually chimed in about it too--- and actually the Clinton Anderson thing is a great example of racial bias: people will accept his abuse because it’s in the context of a white culture but condemn the dancing horse abuse because of it’s context in a middle eastern or south american culture. They’re still both abuse and they’re actually both pretty closely related in terms of abuse but it’s important to understand that abuse is abuse even if a white guy is doing it and if you’re only calling it out when NOT a white guy is doing it then you’re not doing it because you care about horse welfare, you’re doing it because you’re racist) BUT at the same time he’s not going far enough in deciphering and breaking down what he’s sharing.