How Horses Grieve: Leadership Through Loss
When Lisa Perry's mare was near death, Steve made a deliberate choice: don't isolate her. Put her back with her herd, in the hay field where she belonged. What followed was one of those moments that stays with a person for a long time. The horses gathered. They circled. In the fading light, they stood around her as she passed — not in panic, but in communal witness.
This wasn't a random clustering. Horses are prey animals. Their survival instinct is to run from anything that signals danger or death. When they override that instinct and stand their ground in a circle, something else is operating — something that looks, unmistakably, like awareness of what is happening and a collective decision to be present for it.