Originally published on Substack
Freya bites me.
I love her for it.
Not viciously, not out of fear, and not because something hurts. It is communication. She bites me to move me along. When I have ignored her look in the direction she wants to go — the ear flick, the shift of weight, the one or two steps, the tail flick — she nips. Once. It's enough.
It is deliberate, precise, and perfectly timed. And it works, because it gives me a start exactly as it is intended to.
We are very quick to interpret behaviour through the lens of misbehaviour or pathology. A horse bites and we assume something must be wrong — pain, discomfort, mismanagement. We reach for causes we can fix because that restores order. It allows us to believe that behaviour is a problem to be solved rather than something to be understood. But Freya is not saying no. She is not distressed, and she is not defensive. She is directing me.
Horses do this to each other all the time. In a herd, space is not static; it is constantly negotiated. Movement is organised through small, efficient signals — a shift of weight, a look, a step into space. If those signals are ignored, they escalate. A nip, sharper and more definite, enough to create change. Not chaos, not aggression, but clarity. A bite in that context is not an aberration. It is part of the language.
Freya's bite is not random, and it is not excessive. She does not lash out or seek contact for its own sake. She uses it when I am holding her back, when I am too slow, when I fail to respond to the quieter signals that came before it. Move, she says. Not angrily, not anxiously — simply move. And when I do not, she makes sure that I do.
There is something faintly uncomfortable in how effective it is, because it exposes a reversal we are not entirely at ease with. In that moment, she is organising me. Not in some abstract or romantic sense, but physically and directly. She creates an outcome, and I respond. We spend so much time shaping horses into something that does not inconvenience us — something that waits, that tolerates, that absorbs our inconsistency and our delays. A good horse stands still, does not interrupt, does not escalate. It does not challenge our authority.
But in a herd, that horse would not function. It would live on the periphery. Horses are not passive occupants of space; they are active organisers of it.
Freya has not given that up. She expects a response, and she expects clarity. She assumes that when she communicates, something will happen. If it does not, she will make it happen. Not violently, but efficiently.
It would be easy to stop it. Punish her. Snap on the headcollar and make her back up. Kick at her leg. There are a thousand small techniques offered by trainers. You could suppress it, make it unsafe for her to try. She would learn — horses always do. She would stop biting. And with it, she would stop directing, stop insisting, stop engaging in that particular and very honest way.
She would become easier.
More convenient.
And less herself.
What matters is not whether a bite fits within a rulebook of acceptable behaviour. What matters is what it represents. Freya is not shut down, not guessing, not quietly accommodating everything that is asked of her. She is participating.
She has not been trained to stand quietly and obediently at my side, not trying to forage or take a step until I have finished my conversation.
So yes — Freya bites me.
It startles me. It corrects me. It moves me.
And within that small, sharp moment is something intact and functional and alive: a horse who still expects to be heard, and knows how to make sure she is.