Lynda Birke

This paper explores how horses are represented in the discourses of "natural horsemanship", an approach to training and handling horses that advocates see as better than traditional methods. In speaking about their horses, NH enthusiasts move between two registers: On one hand, they use a quasi-scientific narrative, relying on terms and ideas drawn from ethology, to explain the instinctive behavior of horses. Within this mode of narrative, the horse is "other" and must be understood through the human learning to communicate and through appropriate training. On the other hand, NH enthusiasts—like many horse owners—seek to emphasize partnership. In this type of discourse, people portray their horses as almost human. The tensions between these two ways of talking about horses reflect contradictory ideas about control versus freedom in relating to horses, especially as related to emotions expressed by caregivers about their relationships with horses.

Maintaining the tensions and divisions between the human and non-human, nature and culture has been a mainstay of Euro-American thought. Drawing upon two studies of people's associations with horses, we examine how these divisions are being reworked in the social sciences as well in everyday life. We focus on how different ideas about ‘horses’, ‘horsemanship’ and how knowledge is acquired, accomplishes different social worlds. Specifically, what emerges in these differential discourses is that a paradox is put into play to make a distinction between traditional and contemporary ways of being in relation to nature and the animal; it is the paradox of what we want to refer to as ‘natural technologies’. We suggest that the paradox of ‘natural technologies’ is a proliferating feature of Euro-American cultural life that troubles old divisions between nature and culture and propose that it indicates less about a politics of nature than a politics of culture. Specifically, we show that the preoccupation with bringing nature, and the non-human, more into alignment with the human promotes ethics and equality as matters of lifestyle choice to the exclusion of very specific ideas about tradition, hierarchy, evolution and socialization.

"Much more than a book about animal welfare, it explores how the scientific questions and answers would be different if biology operated from a paradigm of respect for the objects of study. Thirteen contributions are arranged in four distinct sections; individual topics vary extensively but each is first-rate." --Choice "Ruth Hubbard and Lynda Birke have asked an important question: how would the practices of biology change if organisms were considered subjects with agency? They have gathered an array of excellent scholars and a broad spectrum of perspectives.... this is a fresh and important question." --Londa Schiebinger Essays explore how the practice of biology could change if scientists treated the organisms they use in their experiments respectfully: what it means to raise animals or plants as experimental resources; what guides decisions about which animals to breed for experimental purposes.