While the concept of rapport is not at all foreign to therapists, counselors and psychologists, for some the notion that horses are equipped with the mental hardware with which to communicate emotionally is pretty tough to swallow.

For centuries horses have served us — in military pursuits, farming endeavors, and now today in the show ring and on the race track. To be sure, the inequality displayed in thoroughbred racing is one of the most atrocious sins of our relationship with horses today. Let’s compare, for example, the median price of a yearling at the Keeneland Thoroughbred sale — one of the nation’s most prestigious marketplaces for young thoroughbred stock — which is $200,000, to the median price of a thoroughbred that can no longer run, which is $600. And the second figure of this comparison does, of course, not reflect the astronomical number of thoroughbreds who are donated, given away, and hauled away to slaughter. The number of thoroughbreds whose fate goes down this road is evidenced by the fact that finding an adoption program with room and funding to take and care for a “used” racehorse is a near impossibility.

And yet, for all this use the horse provides, many of us still shirk at the possibility that he too has emotions. But the horse can give rise to a powerful emotional response in a person, and anyone who has felt this would attest to its feeling of awe. So how can we be so quick to assume that the horse doesn’t feel the same way we do? How can we be so certain that the emotion we feel when around a horse doesn’t rely wholeheartedly on expressed emotion from him?

It certainly does in people. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, lays out a strong case that the emotional contagion that occurs between two people when in emotional synchronicity has traceable biological origins. That is to say, it is measurable. When in emotional flow with another person, Goleman writes, serotonin levels rise, epinephrine is attenuated, and, consequently, the more a person finds himself in this state the less illness he suffers, both physically and psychologically. But this state, of course, requires two people of vibrant emotional capacity.

And this is the first step of any therapist, regardless of theoretical orientation, training, or ideology. Because what any skilled therapist knows cognitively, but feels viscerally when in the room with a client is that if no rapport exists, the vast amount of training, experience or skill, simply won’t matter.

The same, however, is true with training horses. For all expert horsemen, despite the lingo they use, unconsciously harbor the same skill. That is, the ability to establish and maintain rapport with the horse. And just like trained therapists, trained horsemen understand that they may as well put down their ropes, lines, sticks, and fences when rapport is lost. On the other hand, no amount of fancy lingo or fancy tricks can promise rapport with a horse or a client. Instead, rapport is something that, like emotional contagion, comes from within. It is essentially the intersection of understanding, both acknowledged and felt physically, of two beings. And within this emotional space, there is an agreement to act in accordance with one another, toward a further and deeper understanding.

Why is this important in the field of equine therapy? Well, it is therapy after all, and the horse, for all intents and purposes, is acting in a therapeutic role. Why would we not consider rapport with him an absolute?