A Choice to Choose - By Georgia Bruce

A CHOICE TO CHOOSE
by Georgia Bruce

What right have we got to ask another living, breathing, thinking, feeling entity to perform tasks that we desire?

When we buy an animal we think that we own the animal...it appears we do own it on an external level, that is, we own the right to make decisions that affect the welfare and treatment of the animal because it is living in a world governed by humans.
The modern day horse has exactly the same survival instincts as the primitive horse and so it is necessary for the human owners to take responsibility for making decisions about a horses welfare in a world with modern technology that the horse's survival instincts are no longer equipped to deal with. We even own the right to decide whether that animal lives or dies... horses are sent to abattoirs every day in the thousands, because of a human decision.

So we own the horses body and this gives us the reason to think we can make that body perform any task we desire....including pulling things, having a predator sit on it’s back (us) and jumping over obstacles that it could easily walk around. There are many ways that these desires can be achieved and a lot of those ways involve gadgets and equipment to force the animal into performing these behaviors, and so given no choice the horse does perform these very unnatural tasks.

However when we buy a horse we do not own the internal horse, its mind, that is, the horse still retains the right to make his own decisions on the way it chooses to act and react to it's environment and to the requests of it's human "owner". There are many horses every year who are discredited as useless, dangerous and uncooperative by their human owners, these are the horses who do not tolerate the force and techniques used to try and make them "submit".
These horses are generally just misunderstood and they are carted off to mental asylums for horses, abattoirs. However it is the "owners" of these horses that should probably be considered insane. Being the apparent "superior race" we are supposed to be the intelligent ones... with the label of intelligence, I would say that it would be up to us to try to understand the language of another race of beings if they do not understand our own and we want to communicate with them, especially if we want them to perform physical tasks for us.

I liken this to buying sweat shop laborers, only in this case the workers speak another language and are killed if they fail to understand the tasks they are required to perform.

As the intelligent race, I feel it is our responsibility to find ways, first of all to communicate with the horse in a language he understands,..his own (body language) and secondly to present our desires to the horse in a way that causes the horse to WANT TO perform these behaviors, of his own free choice. That really means that they should want to perform these behaviors without any kind of equipment on them at all...at total liberty to make their own decisions.

This is essentially a free will planet...what I mean is that every being on this planet has the right to choose what they think and believe and how they act. We can influence what decision the individual makes by creating positive or negative consequences to their actions which really is the basis of all learning. The main necessity required for learning is that the individual can remember which specific behavior results in what outcome and this allows them to be discerning in their choice of behavior depending on what outcome they desire.

"ultimately each individual has the ability to choose their thoughts and actions"

I ask you the reader to please consider this carefully and I know that you have the right to choose whether you think I am raving on about nonsense or whether I am saying something of importance. Either way I respect your decision as an entity on this free will planet.