Beyond a Contract: Rethinking Care Networks of Working Animals

Having worked with horses for thirteen years as a farmhand and riding instructor, I have come to view them more as peers than animals. Horses and humans share a working relationship in the barn where I work, and although I generally believe this relationship is mutually beneficial, horses often seem to do more for us than we do for them. This sometimes makes me question—do horses need us as much as we need them? 

The entire interspecies relationship within a barn—among horse and rider, worker, or owner—forms the foundation of the horse industry. Though often described in emotionally charged terms, the relationship is primarily based on the fact that domesticated horses work in exchange for human care. But, instead of the human-horse relationship, what happens when we turn our attention to horses’ relationships with one another? In this essay, I explore this question by drawing on a story of two separated horses and the human and nonhuman power dynamics that define notions of care in the barn.

The Story of Willie and Latte

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In 2021, the barn I work at received two new horses, Willie and Latte. Born and raised at the same barn, the siblings had lived together for their seventeen years until the barn closed. This is the first time I had ever seen a pair of equine biological siblings. We housed them in adjacent stalls, but soon after their arrival, their intense codependency quickly became disruptive. Whenever one was taken out of the stall, the other would erupt into nonstop screaming. To solve the problem, we separated them. Willie was on one side of the barn, and Latte was on the opposite. Willie worked in the mornings, and Latte worked in the afternoons. Willie went outside in the paddock near the road, and Latte went in the paddock near the woods and wetlands on the other side of the property. Because of our intervention, Willie and Latte went from spending every minute together to virtually never seeing each other.

After a few weeks of separation, Willie and Latte had stopped screaming for each other, and everything was running smoothly. It was summer, and I was riding Latte outside. Suddenly I heard a whinny and saw a figure in the distance running towards the fence line. As I got closer, I realized it was Willie, but Latte noticed long before me as her ears perked up and pointed forward in attentiveness. We reached Willie’s paddock, and we were separated from him only by the fence. Latte pulled me over to right up against Willie’s gate—so closely that my leg was brushing up against the side and they touched noses—and Willie walked in synchronized fashion next to her for the entire length of the fence line. Their strong physical bond in this moment was indicative of overall herd dynamics—and how we as humans alter them for our own benefit.

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Separating bonded horses for the sake of business is a common practice in the horse-showing industry. The industry prioritizes competition, sales, and investment returns, which results in frequent relocations of show horses across states and internationally to create economic opportunities for their owners. The older horses we receive have already lived multiple lives. The barn where I work is often their second, third, or even fourth home. Since horses are regarded as highly social herd animals, we expect them to adjust to the new environment, neighbors, caregivers, and students quickly. After a brief “adjustment period,” horses are expected to work. Separating Willie and Latte to resolve their codependency was to prepare them for this—to ensure they could perform the labor expected of them. But, by doing this, we disrupted their care for one another, ignored their autonomous history—a common failure in human-animal relationships, as Weston points out in “Habit in Cohabitation” (Weston 2022).

My act of physically riding Latte during this moment is also a direct manifestation of the human-animal power dynamics at the barn. I as a human had the opportunity to stop their reuniting and turn Latte away from her brother, but I did not act on my human agency in this moment. The staff at the barn generally shared a view that horses benefit from the working relationship with their human counterparts as much as we do. But moments like this made me wonder how Willie and Latte might feel about the separating of their bonds. 

By changing their relationship to each other, we were also reconfiguring the horses’ social worlds while telling ourselves that such adjustment was necessary to maintain the contract: providing horses with food and shelter in exchange for their service labor. In practice, the barn is filled with such complex encounters, as a shared space that is structured by attempts at both care and confinement. In the following sections, I examine this particular encounter by situating it within the tension between the horses’ autonomy and the structural conditions that reshape their lives—including our role as their caretakers.

Dependency at Work, in the Barn

The story of Willie and Latte is first and foremost a tale of care and dependency. In a relevant piece, Sunaura Taylor (2022) argues that, much like disabled people, domestic animals are often seen as passive recipients of care, which in turn reinforces hierarchical devaluation of dependency. This way of patterning human-animal relationship is often used to justify meat eating in the co-evolution theory—which argues that “human beings and domesticated animals have entered into a contract with each other that is largely based on the idea of mutual advantage” (Taylor 2022, 150). She challenges such perspective by suggesting that care should be understood as a reciprocal, relational act rather than a contract premised upon mutual advantage.

At the barn I worked—and the horse industry in general—pursuing “mutual advantage” mean that humans assume the responsibility of caring for horses in exchange for their services. But, in daily practice, there are aspects of interdependence between horses and humans that go beyond such co-evolutionary description of food and shelter for service. Very few people in the world are actually independent, which speaks to the fact that we rely, and historically have relied, on horses for jobs, for recreation, entertainment, transportation, status, religion, and in countless other ways. The partnership between humans and horses would be impossible without networks of care among and across species. If so, we cannot simply “other” the horse and expect them to not form care networks of their own.

The problem lies in the fact that domestic animals, in particular, are “for the most part dependent on humans for survival—a situation requiring an ethic that recognizes this inequality” (Taylor 2022, 142). Not to let dependency become an excuse for exploitation, humans are obliged to understand horses not as inherently dependent on human care, but as autonomous agents and vital contributors to the world.

I’m not suggesting that my coworkers or I have neglected our horses, but our solution to Willie’s and Latte’s behavior reflected an assumed superiority in a relationship that should be mutually caring. In fact, in the global horse industry, there are growing calls for change to prioritize the well-being of domestic horses. According to Karen Luke, Andrea Rawluk, and Tina McAdie, the management of “poor horse behavior” typically has an anthropocentric focus by trying to provide a linear explanation of cause and effect—to which the authors propose a reconceptualization through a more complex understanding of interconnected components and feedback relationships, before jumping to immediate separation (Luke et al. 2023).

Managing “Overly Attached” Horses

When owners have “overly attached” horses, the typical solution is to house them at opposite ends of the property, out of sight and contact (Equus Magazine 2024). It is also recommended that owners place another horse nearby for companionship and distraction, ideally during dinnertime when their attention is focused on eating (Williams 2024). This is exactly what we did with Willie and Latte. While this approach may seem like a way to minimize their emotional distress, the language surrounding it is problematic in terms of human-animal power dynamics. Unaware of the impact, we separated Willie and Latte, deceived them, and disrupted their care network for our own benefit.

However, to those of us who work with and alongside horses, the “over attachment” of Willie and Latte was something more than a mere “behavioral problem.” When Willie and Latte arrived at the barn, we noticed how “rare” it was for a pair of full equine siblings to be moved to the same property. Horses are capable of kinship, affection, and care. Because we knew this, we were marveled at the fact that such capacities of Willie and Latte hadn’t been disabled by their industrial living environments earlier.

My barn manager, Anne Dylewski, who received her Bachelor of Science in Animal Science, said that, because most breeding facilities want to sell their horses quickly, Willie and Latte may as well have wound up in different places. When new horses arrive, she requests as many veterinary records as possible, but much of their biographical information is lost due to frequent ownership changes. Some horse sellers also deliberately misrepresent a horse’s age for economic gain—a calculated, routinized creation of non-knowledge in a for-profit industry.

But the previous owners of Willie and Latte bred them for the purpose of keeping them, and at the same time, using them for their own business. How did Willie and Latte maintain a bond when their lives were consumed for work? Is there any part of the horse caretaking process that seeks to maintain horse kinship?

To my question, Anne told me that, because horses are herd animals, even just being on the same property with their own kind and seeing each other can have a beneficial effect on their well-being: their networks of intraspecies care. She added that, although some horses get attached more easily than others, like Willie, letting them spend quality time together as “friends” is “important so long as they don’t get herd bound or overly attached so that one or both are distressed if not around the other.” Her response indicated that the definition of “over attachment” in horse behavior directly corresponds to their usefulness to humans. When they are “difficult to deal with,” they are “overly attached,” Anne said.

Anne agreed that the standard practice of separating overly attached horses—suggested by Equus magazine—is the best solution we have. After making this comment, however, she also added an interesting point that the bonding among horses doesn’t become an issue after they retire. At a retirement location, they will be grouped into herds, and the owners will let them stay together, regardless of their assigned group. Therefore, separation of overly attached horses is, I argue, a product of the working environment, of which design of time and space—such individual stalls, paddocks, and work schedules—reflect the intention to enforce a labor contract more to the advantage of humans. However unconditional our care for the horses appears mutually advantageous, the premises of domestication shape subtle conditions for its practice on the ground.

Rethinking the Ethics of Equine Care

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As Anne implicated, working horses are expected to maintain a certain level of patience, politeness, and skills to fit into our world and to do their job—to teach kids and adults to ride and care for animals—both on the ground and under saddle. The horses at our barn are only ridden for about an hour a day. This might make it seem like they are only working for that one hour. But, in reality, the rest of their day consists of constant interaction with humans, during which we expect the same levels of patience and politeness. 

When they are not interacting with humans, at night, for example, they are locked in their twelve-by-twelve-foot stalls. In this “contract” we have with them, there seems to be very little room for them to foster their own intraspecies relationships as they would in a wild herd setting.

Our role as caretakers in the barn is to keep both humans and horses safe. However, ethical dilemmas do arise, as I’ve shown in this essay through my own experience with Willie and Latte. As we try to make the contract work with our horses, we simultaneously begin to recognize forms of “non-labor” that take place within domesticated environments—more of which may be essential for imagining a more equal human-horse relationship. 

In Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis (2020), an employee at a pork factory farm, Maria, refuses to become part of a highly stimulated reproduction process of sows and piglet bodies by providing a form of palliative care, when she pets on the sow’s back during artificial insemination practices. Blanchette argues that “her practice matters because it is the only one [he] encountered that directly questions human volition and agency on the insemination line” (Blanchette 2020, 116). This scene reminded me of my own gesture of care that allowed Willie and Latte to meet again, even though I wasn’t able to change the entire condition of the encounter. This form of “non-labor,” enabling a re-meet of two equine siblings, indicates that horse welfare is not solely based on their dependency to us, but it revolves around a balance of fostering both human-animal and animal-animal care networks.

About the author

Karey Balkind is a junior undergraduate at Duke University, majoring in Cultural Anthropology. Her interests include disability, labor, and environmental change. She’s currently exploring the concept of “frontier,” as it relates to tourism, cultural capital, and environmental changes in the American West.

References

Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Luke, Karen, Andrea Rawluk, and Tina McAdie. 2022. “A New Approach to Horse Welfare Based on Systems Thinking.” Animal Welfare 31(1): 37–49.

Taylor, Sunaura. 2022. “Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 140–158. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Weston, Kath. 2022. “The Habit in Cohabitation.” Humanimalia 13(1): 45–78.

Williams, Jennifer. 2024. “Separating Overly Attached Horse Buddies.” Equus Magazine, January 4, 2024. https://equusmagazine.com/behavior/horse_buddies_021009-8327.