{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson","title":"What Wild Horses Taught Me About Consciousness | Mary Ann Simonds | LFRF 56","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":8198,"description":"✨ \"I knew the outcome before I designed the study. I was designing the study with the hypothesis I already knew the answer to.\" – 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 SimondsMary 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 double degrees in range management and wildlife biology at the University of Wyoming, and began her career as a field biologist studying wild horses and mustangs in the 1970s. Her undergraduate range data became the study cited to justify mass BLM removals of wild horses — something she didn't discover until she was appointed to the National Advisory Board for Wild Horses and Burros in the early 1990s. She has worked for oil and gas companies as a reclamation specialist, pioneered ecotourism partnerships with ranchers in Wyoming and Oregon, studied interspecies communication at Nippon Animal Science University in Tokyo, 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.FREE Helios Harmony...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/edefuo9BicUw7iv3tBYu0A0WPDz35rwksjCWzqzh4lQ/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQwOTg5LzE2ODIz/MzM0MzYtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}