The feral horses of Shackleford Island
Walking along a deserted beach looking for shells on a small, uninhabited island, one notices horse tracks. They seem oddly out of place among the roar of the surf, the sea oats, and the dim images of distant freighters out on the horizon. But they are not out of place, for they belong to a group of wild horses who have inhabited the island for almost 500 years. The man who is looking for shells came to the island not for the shells, but to see the horses, observe their daily lives, and hopefully learn from them.
Why be interested in wild horses? Why not follow the reductionist approach of science and go into the laboratory and study parts...dissect the horse and isolate smaller and smaller parts, and then try to understand the parts? After all, does not science tell us that by understanding the parts one can understand the whole? Well, those of us who prefer the holistic approach understand that all the parts working together create a synergy - a whole that is more than just the sum of the parts. All the parts working together create something more, something different, that cannot be understood by just looking at the parts. The result of isolating and studying parts is to miss the understanding of the whole.
For example, an attempt to understand the hoof by isolating individual parts will fail, because one misses the synergy of the hoof in the interactive whole consisting of the horse and the environment. Therefore, to understand the horse, one must look at the synergy reflected in the big picture of the horse and its environment. There is no better way to do that than allow oneself to stand in awe of horses who survive with little or no human intervention; that is, the way horses survived for eons before they were domesticated and became the subject of dissections and laboratory experiments.
