What Wild Horses Taught Me About Consciousness | Mary Ann Simonds | LFRF 56

✨ "All social species seek connections. People and horses are no different. Safety and comfort are the core elements to build strong social bonds regardless of species. “ – Mary Ann Simonds

✨ "The best tool we have is be the best human you can be. You don't have to know everything. You just have to be clear on yourself and be pure and be silent, and then help your horse be the best horse it can be." – Mary Ann Simonds

Mary Ann Simonds has spent more than four decades sitting at the intersection of wildlife biology, consciousness studies, and horsemanship — and almost none of it has looked the way science was supposed to look. She grew up in California riding hunter/jumpers, earned her BS from the University of Wyoming in Wildlife Conservation and Management and a minor in Range Management studying wild horse ecology and whole systems approaches.   She was appointed to the National Advisory Board for Wild Horses and Burros in the early 1990s after years of field research on wild horse behavioral ecology.  She has worked for oil and gas companies as a reclamation specialist, pioneered ecotourism partnerships with ranchers in Wyoming and Oregon, taught interspecies communication at Nippon Veterinary and Life Sciences University in Tokyo, earned a graduate degree in Inter-disciplinary Consciousness Studies and has spent years working quietly behind the scenes in the sport horse welfare world near her home in Wellington, Florida.

Her new book, A Horse by Nature, published by Trafalgar Square, draws on all of it — wild horse social behavior, domestic horse psychology, welfare ethics, and practical communication tools — organized in red, blue, and green tips so riders can go straight to what they need most. It is, as Rupert and Mary Ann agree at the end of this conversation, Part One of what will be a longer series.

This is a conversation about what happens when rigorous science and genuine animal communication occupy the same person — and what that has to teach anyone who lives and works with horses.

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What You'll Learn in This Episode

00:05:30 – How Mary Ann first recognized, at age 11, that a trainer couldn't hear what a horse with a headache was saying — and why that question drove her entire career00:13:00 – What double degrees in range management and wildlife biology taught her about the gap between academic science and what animals are actually doing00:39:00 – The dietary overlap study s