Can horses teach humans ways to live better lives?
The 11 acres of Thunderbird Ridge: The Equus Experiential Discovery and Learning Campus were virtually empty.
Raven, a horse, had been paid — more correctly, her gentle caretakers had been paid — more than $1,000, including New Mexico state sales tax, on the understanding that she would lift the veil on my mortal existence and thus improve it in some way. Two hours had been allotted for this purpose. Time was running thin.
What is Equus?
Apprehending the business of Equus from the Equus website is either simple or impossible.
A caliginous floating video of a glassy-black horse eye blinks perpetually on the homepage. Scrolling down, we encounter, close up, a human hand and horsehair in intimate caress. On the “Animal Partners” section of the “Team” page a kind of employee ID gallery for Equus horses each horse at the property is rendered an artistic fraction of itself: Artemis’ eye. Dante’s eye. Cisco’s mandible, seen from below.
This horse portraiture is intentionally fragmentary, said Kelly Wendorf, an executive and personal development coach, who in 2016 founded Equus with her
business and romantic partner J. Scott Strachan, who is also an executive and personal development coach.
“If you see a picture of somebody, let’s say, running with a horse during their two-hour experience, and you don’t end up running with a horse ...” said Wendorf, 56, reflecting on clients’ expectations and the dearth of visual exposition on her website. She trailed off.
Strachan, 63, jumped in. “We don’t want to put anything in the space that limits the possibilities,” he said. “We don’t want to create expectations. The more curious you show up here, the more can happen.”
The Equus Experience is tailored to each client. Participants may engage with one or more horses from the company’s herd. They may
or may not be asked to lead horses in tasks. Riding of the horses isn’t allowed.
The possible effects, opportunities, outcomes, fruits, impacts, ramifications and surprises of Equus, according to the company’s website, include: “literally changing your brain to be wired toward presence, attunement and wisdom,” “creating the life you really deserve,” learning “in a joyful, memorable, yet powerful way that is sustained over time,” mastering “nonverbal skills,” sensing “‘emergent’ futures” and “much more.”
The program derives from what founders frequently refer to as “56 million years of wisdom” an allusion to the debut in the fossil record of the equid ancestor of the modern domestic horse Equus ferus caballus.