Horse Matters: Re‐examining Sustainability through Human‐Domestic Animal Relationships

Abstract

Sociology increasingly recognises that ‘the social’ extends beyond ‘the human’. The ongoing theoretical integration of animals has extended our understanding of notions like alienation, violence and technology. This article considers in turn the highly contested concept of sustainability. Focusing on our entangled relationships with domestic animals, particularly horses, extends our critical understanding of sustainability in three ways. First, by recognising horses as social actors, we can challenge the anthropocentrism of sustainability and integrate animals into our analysis of how social systems create and /or resist sustainability claims. Second, in adding species to traditional categories of race, class and gender, we can extend critiques of sustainability by considering how it intersects with relations of power. Third, by exploring how alternative visions of the future emerge from within everyday as well as epic settings and encounters, the article broadens our understanding of what should be sustained and for whom.

Beekeeping, stewardship and multispecies care in rural contexts

“…The recent Values Assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services emphasises the importance of a reconsideration of the values that underpin human relationships to the rest of the environment and the myriad species with which we cohabit the earth (IPBES, 2022). While multispecies ethnographies have explored human relationships with companion animals (Coulter, 2016;Cudworth, 2021), horses (Wadham, 2020) and charismatic megafauna (Lorimer, 2015), many of the species central to stable ecosystem functioning are less visible, creating significant obstacles to direct engagement and study. As a result, less charismatic, particularly non-mammalian, species are generally underrepresented in multispecies ethnographies and rural sociology (Maderson & Elsner-Adams, 2023).…”

Agents of sustainability: How horses and people co‐create, enact and embed the good life in rural places

“…Second, it enables us to pay careful attention to the differences between particular individuals, even as we acknowledge the generic collective qualities of species (Haraway, 2008; Wadham, 2020a). Calvert (2018) highlights how our attempts to standardise animal bodies and experiences lead to real and problematic material consequences for the animals involved.…”

“…Specifically, our findings confirm earlier work on how animals live alongside us (e.g., Calvert 2018; Holloway and Bear 2017) and existing scholarship on animals' configurational role in shaping rural sociality (e.g., Dalke 2019;Fijn 2011;Swart 2010). However, we add to this by illuminating how animals also impact our thinking about sustainability (Kopnina et al 2018;Policarpo et al 2018;Wadham 2020a).…”

“…Of particular interest to us here is work that focuses on horses and the role they play in shaping societies, places and the human and nonhuman relationships within and between them (e.g., see Dalke, 2019; Fijn, 2011; Swart, 2010). However, this ‘animal turn’ has had little impact on broader thinking about sustainability (Kopnina et al., 2018; Policarpo et al., 2018; Wadham, 2020a). By taking greater account of animals in the way we understand the relationship between sustainability and the good life, this article hopes to expand our understanding of both.…”

Sustainability Education Beyond the Classroom

“…It is difficult to apportion responsibility, for example, when the respective causes and consequences of unsustainable practices may be geographically distant (Murphy, 2012). Likewise, temporal complexities arise, as the changes required -to cultural, physical and social structures -are urgent yet simultaneously slow-moving (Wadham, 2020). Our understanding of sustainability, then, is necessarily incomplete, fragmented and contradictory: This can lead to a reluctance to engage with the concept altogether (Longo et al, 2016).…”