My Favorite Quote Ever - So Far This Week

"A social worker would be fascinated by my in-laws' family dynamics." A friend of mine, gearing up for her visit to her in-laws' house for the Thanksgiving holiday.

It's a well-known fact that holidays are stressful. So many - often unrealistic - expectations are piled on top of the mashed potatoes and turkey and ham bones and pie and cranberries. We want fellowship, time to catch up with family, heartfelt conversations - but instead we get football and work in the kitchen, and if we're lucky, the men do the dishes. If we're not lucky, we spend all day on our feet preparing a meal, serving a meal, and cleaning up after a meal, and somehow the day goes by without any reflection or recognition of each other.

And then there are the veiled comments, the blunt comments, and the outright inflammatory comments, all made with bubbling gravy and the scent of cinnamon apple candles in the background. Knowing what I do about animal behavoir, this makes perfect sense to me.

I did my thesis research on the dynamics of young male wild horses, specifically sub-adult bachelor male groups. There were 3 to 8 horses in each group, and when the groups would meet each other, they would go through an elaborate ritual to establish dominance. This is what all social creatures do when reunited. The hierarchy, the lines of control, must be established.

The horses would stare at each other.

If one bowed or lowered its head, he admitted subservience.

If not, they would approach each other.

One would drop to a knee and bite at the other's hocks. If a horse loses an achilles tendon in the wild, he is dead. This was a very ritualizing form of biting though, and rarely did any horse break the skin or do any real damage.

At any point the horses could lower its head, chomp its teeth, and bow out of the fight, admitting his lower rank in the hierarchy.

There was a lot of circling involved, a lot of staring, and in the end, a lot of giving up and chomping of teeth.

The mares, the females, were much more vicious to each other when establishing an alpha.

I don't really have a rosy ending to this post. Humans should be able to keep the peace better, matriarchs and patriarchs should be able to quash their evolutionary drive for dominance. The human's ritualized fight for dominance - words shaped and formed like weapons, aimed at other human targets at the dinner table - should be civilized. We should be past it.

But we're not.