Horses as players in equine sports

ABSTRACT

Though animal ethics in sport obviously applies most urgently to cases of animals at mortal risk (e.g., hunting and bullfighting) or vulnerable to various types of abuse (e.g., doping and harmful training practices), less obvious domains bear scrutiny as well. Here I examine whether we can strictly take not just riders but horses to be players in equine sports. There is an apparent tension in the concept of equestrian prowess, a peculiar blend of skills and attitudes, between regarding horses as subjects of persuasion or collaboration and treating them as objects of control. As our understanding of animal cognition and behaviour continues to improve, it becomes increasingly clear that animal intelligence and agential capacities are far greater than we formerly presumed. In this light, using Suits’s theory of games, I argue that horses are game players that sometimes consent (or assent) and sometimes refuse to play equine sports. Drawing on recent accounts of horse-rider partnership and on my own equestrian background, I conclude by sketching a utopian vision of what equine sports could be.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal agency
• equine sport
• equine voluntarism
• game
• player

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here I follow the standard view of Huizinga (Huizinga [1950] 2022, 5), among others. As an anonymous reviewer has observed, however, what seems like nonhuman play might amount to nothing more than dominance-establishing behaviour.

2. I thank Andrew Fenton for this point.

3. The sound of such clucking is unlike that of a chicken and what in other contexts would seem a disapproving ‘tsk tsk’.

4. There are epistemological issues here, of course, but my focus is conceptual and metaphysical rather than, say, how we can tell whether rider and horse are in a state of ideal partnership.

5. Kant himself thinks we only have indirect duties to nonhuman animals insofar as sympathizing with their suffering helps us in our duty to perfect ourselves as moral beings (Kant [1797] 1991, 238). Cholbi (2014) gives an explicitly Kantian account of duties to nonhuman animals as direct rather than indirect.

6. I assume that the know-how in which equestrian prowess consists has evidentiary value despite being dismissible by a more traditional epistemology for being partly implicit and too ‘practical’. See Polanyi (2009).

7. See Allen (2004) for discussion of how appropriately affectionate attitudes can facilitate such understanding.

8. I thank Rebekah Humphreys for raising this problem along with the related concern about how many horses are mistreated in retirement.

9. See Palmer (2010, 63–76) for discussion of the complexities involved in the ethical treatment of animals vis-à-vis domestication.

10. The 2011 documentary film Buck movingly captures this distinction in horse training methods.

11. I remind the reader that in Suits’s theory of games such obstacles may be literal (e.g. fences in jumping) or figurative (e.g. waiting for the start in racing).

12. I thank Sam Morris for emphasizing this point. In the case of horses this may amount to what Morris (2018, 388) calls tacit consent.

13. Similarly, that a horse responds the rider’s cues when performing in no way compromises the horse’s full participation as game player, just as one dancer following another dancer’s lead in a competition does nothing to undermine their agency or full participation.

14. For those with institutional inclinations, consider ‘sport’ to be used in scare quotes. I am trying to say something here about equine understanding of games, not sports, and so nothing hinges on calling this game a ‘winter sport’.

15. Thanks to Elizabeth Foreman and Gabriela Tymowski-Gionet for encouraging feedback at the conference where the original version of this paper was presented. I also thank Andrew Fenton for helpful comments on a subsequent draft, and my mother, Alyce Holt, for supplying photos used in the conference presentation, for teaching me to ride all those years ago, and for driving me and Sparky to horse shows and accompanying us on pleasant hacks with Lee Roy..