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June 6 - June 13, 2020
He’s been abused and abandoned, and that can make an animal sick with despair. You need to give this animal a purpose. You need to find him a job.”
Hawaii became her home because it treated her like family.
It felt like we were clicking off centuries rather than miles; in little more than one hour, two hundred years vanished from the landscape.
During thunderstorms, we’d be startled by a sudden pounding on the door before remembering that it was just Lawrence, feeling lonely and wanting to come inside.
“First-timers either love it and never stop, or disappear and never return,” Ken Chlouber told me. “You’ll either be cured or addicted.”
Movement is big medicine; it’s the signal to every cell in our bodies that no matter what kind of damage we’ve suffered, we’re ready to rebuild and move away from death and back toward life.
We had animals on the brain for more than 300,000 years—and then, out of the blue, Edison and Ford came along and stole our hearts.
Animals were simultaneously our dearest friends and our deadliest enemies, and after 300,000 years, you don’t just end a bond like that without paying a price.
But after the critters showed up, Earl became a new man. Fights and suicide attempts in the hospital had plunged so dramatically that medications were cut by half.
But among prisoners who’ve worked with animals, the recidivism rate tends to be as low as 10 percent.
Pet a dog for as few as five minutes and your heart rate and breathing will slow; your blood pressure will drop; your muscles will relax and your breathing will moderate. That’s amazingly fast. For a narcotic to relieve stress in five minutes, you’d need a face mask and a tank of nitrous oxide.
The real question isn’t what we get from animals. It’s what we lose without them.
Donkeys are so tough to tame, we saved them for last; first, we toughened ourselves up by domesticating just about everything else with hooves—cattle, sheep, goats, even llamas.
“But with a donkey, anything you start you have to finish.”
But if I forced Sherman to run, would he ever want to?
If you present a goat with an unsolvable problem, it won’t just hoist its tail and walk off, the way cats do;*4 instead, it will look you dead in the eye and wordlessly ask for help. Try it yourself: all you need is a goat and a Tupperware of pasta.
Human toddlers communicate this way. So do adult dogs and some horses, but they’re a different case: they’ve been selected and bred for centuries to perform complex jobs by our side. With goats, it’s natural; they just seem to believe they can reason with us.
“He’s like a prisoner who’s been in solitary. Now he’s out in the world and everything looks weird and dangerous. But if he sees something once, he figures it out and remembers.”
he was going to confront scary new things everywhere he went, so maybe it was better to forget long distances for now and focus on one scary thing at a time.
Instinct will take you only so far; after that you rely on fellow creatures as role models. Sherman had never learned Basic Donkey,
Historically, donkeys lead and owners follow. Donkeys like to be in front, because their No. 1 survival instinct is to scan the world ahead and make their own decisions, step by step, about where to place each hoof.
Donkeys operate on one frequency—trust. They do nothing on faith,
“When Sherman knows he can trust you, it will change everything. You’ll see a difference in him you won’t believe.”
Sam’s uncle knew that happiness, health, and security come from devoting yourself to two things—your family and your friends—and anything that doesn’t bring you closer to both is pulling you in the wrong direction.
debates for itself whether this new thing will help them learn patience, self-control, and empathy. If not, maybe the smart play is to avoid it.
My Old Order neighbors understood that horses are less about transportation and more about education; for every hour they devoted to training their animals, their animals were quietly returning the favor.
Sam opened my eyes to the difference between rules that hold you back and rules that help you grow.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be having that again,” Amos told me the next day. “Not enough evenings in life to spoil another one.” The Amish aren’t closed to the world, he’s saying; they’re just a little more goal-oriented about how much of it to let in.
“It’s all about building a bank of goodwill. You never want to draw down too much. You want to keep adding to the reserve, one good experience after another. Someday, you’re going to ask Sherman to do something he doesn’t like, and because you’ve built up the bank, he’s going to surprise you.”
we weren’t protecting him anymore; we were boring the shit out of him.
One thing you discover on even a small farm is that come winter, everything weighs fifty pounds and you’re always carrying it someplace: bales of hay to the feeders, bales of straw to the stalls, five-gallon buckets from the creek to the frozen water trough, chunks of logs from the woods for splitting, split firewood into the house for heating, and those eight-foot fence posts still piled in the yard, which, I suddenly remembered, absolutely had to be hand-dug and pounded in place right away before the ground froze.
Brain opioids are so powerful that if you exercise, you can lower your “mental health burden” by nearly 25 percent and enjoy a much higher ratio of positive mental health days—a whopping 43 percent—than non-exercisers experience.
If you spend half your life getting a daily superdose of dopamine, what happens when you suddenly quit?
“Don’t turn it into a fight. You’ll lose, and you’ll only teach him how to beat you. On to Plan C.”
Colorado donkeys aren’t a bunch of Flowers and Shermans; they’re a whole different breed, descended from wild stock that survived by stomping mountain lions to death.
“I’m not melodramatic,” said Hal, kind of unnecessarily for a guy who looks handcrafted from hardwood and saddle leather. “But the best parts of me I owe to those animals.”
“Road races are so tedious and repetitive,” Hal told me. “But with burros, you’re totally focused.
Animal falls, rolls over, comes back up on its feet. That’s why so many horse riders break a leg—from the horse rolling over them.
“We base our decisions on logic. Theirs are based on sensory perception,” Mary explained. “While we’re assembling information in our brains, they’re relying on a really keen sense of smell and hearing. Their judgment is amazing and lightning fast.”
Come race day, our biggest nemesis might not be alpine thin air or thundering creeks, but six different brains making their own survival choices. All of us would be stressed, and weary, and absolutely sure the other five didn’t know jack.
“Bunch of bull, blaming her,” he’d snort. “Figure out your own mistake before you start crying about the burro.”
She’d tested my leadership and found two flaws: I didn’t have the wind to order her on, and when she tempted me with a chance to rest, I grabbed it. Someone had to step up their game, and it wasn’t Flower.
Their occupation is so gratifying, in other words, that the best thank-you you can give them for doing it well is to let them do it some more.
“All creatures have a biological imperative: The sun is up, so how do I fill my day?”
“The best situation,” Horowitz advised me, “is to find a coordination of purposes.” A job that matches their natural drive. Dinner that feels like dessert.
Running fast can auto-correct your biomechanics, he explained, while slow leads to sloppy. That’s a big reason I was always hurt; my plodding pace had me balancing too long on each leg, leaving all those tissues and tendons exposed to serious torque as my body weight swayed around.
And it couldn’t be simpler: first, you warm up with an easy two-mile run. Then you sprint for thirty seconds, and jog lightly to recover. Repeat, alternating sprints and jogs, until you’ve had enough. Don’t worry, you’ll know when;
That way, we’d be building our wind and our leg strength while teaching the donkeys to ignore our gasping. Rather than pretend we weren’t dying, we had to normalize it.
The more we pushed the pace, the more we’d lower our resting heart rates and improve our performance at high altitude.
Hills are the universal equalizer; that’s why even in races, shrewd ultrarunners will hike any terrain that makes them lift their heads. Sure, a runner will beat a hiker to the peak, but not by much—and not for long. Three
