ABSTRACT
In most human contexts, changing others always involves much talk (symbolic action, discourse). This is true, maybe even particularly true, of academic, disciplined, analytic efforts to say something new about humanity. Snackers made problems for humans. Snackers had been orphaned and lived in the “Foal Barn” of an institution call “Equine Healers.” The foal barn was made of corrugated steel siding wrapped around a rectangle frame of 2 × 4 wood beams. Snackers was making a mess for the humans who had, of course, made the occasion for the mess by building barns and fenced pastures. Bateson once wondered what a cat says when it makes certain sounds as a human opens the refrigerator door. Bateson suggested that humans could translate the sounds as “something like ‘dependency, dependency, dependency.’” Somewhere in Colorado, there is a place call “Equine Healers” where some humans, mostly women, practice what they call “equine-assisted psychotherapy.” For a few months Van Tiem conducted ethnographic fieldwork there.
