“I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control. Now we walk along the same...
more“I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.
Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.” (Atwood, 1985, The Handmaid’s tale).
Don’t overrate it! The freedom from – is my perspective when it comes to equine welfare. In this chapter I will discuss freedom from (negative equine welfare) and freedom to (positive equine welfare), how we can ensure equine welfare in Equine Assisted Interventions (EAI) by having an Equine Professional (EP) on our team, and how this contributes to better EAI. I will also look at what kind of knowledge an EP needs to fulfill this role and the reasons why we do equine assisted
interventions in the first place. What is it that the equine brings into the equation?
Including an EP into practices of EAI ensures that the equines who do this work will receive the welfare and well-being they need, deserve, and are entitled to. An EP ensures that the work we do together in EAI teams (clients, equines, therapist, EP) is also ethically sound for the equine. We cannot provide good quality EAI without ensuring high welfare standards for the equines. So, if you are a therapist or a coach, partnering with an EP will improve the welfare and well-being for the equines and, as a result, will also improve the services you provide, which, in the end, will benefit your clients.
There is no formal, internationally standardized education for Equine Professionals, yet most of them know much about equines, equine welfare, and equine-human interaction. How can we best make sure their knowledge and experience are acknowledged, implemented, put in motion, but also up to date, so they can contribute both to equine welfare in EAI and to better EAI?
Equine welfare and well-being is a very complex subject, imbued with human paradigms, preconceived notions, cultural inheritance, and often personal experiences of equines. You can think of welfare in terms of seeing to it that the equines you work with have enough to eat and drink; have a stable in which to live, preferably with other equines; are once in a while taken out; are trained to behave towards people; are thoroughly brushed and trimmed. But that is the simple, and, in my eyes, deceitful version of welfare. This kind of welfare looks only at the minimum requirements of what an equine “needs”, and which, on the surface, appears to be good enough, but is far from the standards we need to reach, keep, and develop in the field of EAI. For us, the equine is not only defined by the species to which he belongs, even if that also sets the parameters for our welfare standards, but he is also an individual, who needs to have agency in his life, and choices to make, so that his life is neither boring to him nor too stressful.1 Negative equine welfare will not suffice, we need to move beyond the freedom from – and let the equines have freedom to... And to be able to do that transition, we need to know more about horses – how else are we to know what they need, want, and desire to have freedom to do, experience, live, feel, explore?
In general, we underestimate the cognitive capabilities of horses. We need to change the picture of the horse as simply a reactive and fearful, big animal with a small brain, so we then can change how we raise, keep, train, feed, communicate with, think of, and work with horses. We in the field of EAI can be forerunners, be active contributors to raising the standards of equine welfare and be promoters of well-being and equine rights. If we settle with the kind of welfare standards that are common in riding schools, in equestrian sports, in most livery yards etc., we will provide therapy and other activities that are limited by their welfare standards. We need to go beyond these standards. To be able to do that, we need to define, untangle, identify, and verify what an equine is and needs, what his subjectivity means, what individuality means, what agency is and can mean, what sentience is, what an equine is contributing with in EAI, how he is contributing, how we guarantee that he has, gets, and will get what he needs to thrive, how his welfare standards affects the outcome of therapy and other equine assisted interventions. We simply need a new welfare paradigm. Equine Professionals can bring this paradigm forward and help hold us all in EAI accountable to it. By being a driving force in shifting the welfare paradigm, the EP will gain
validity for what she knows and can do to develop the area of EAI and the necessary ethics we need for the benefit of the equine, the therapist, the client/customer, and, of course, the EP herself.
(1 I will through this article use the pronoun he for equines and the pronoun she for Equine Professionals and therapists. This does not reflect any gender biased perceptions on my behalf, it is just done out of convenience.)
Change the word animals to horses (or equines) in this quote by Henry Beston:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” (Beston, 1928)
Equines are not mystical beings, not “magical unicorns”, but they do reside in another umwelt, another nation, than do humans.2 We share the same planet, live in the same world, yet we do not. They are different from us, yet similar. Maybe they are more holistic beings than we; more complete beings?
