Restoring the Cultural Importance of Horses

Returning to relationship, remembrance, and healing with the more-than-human world

There was a time when human beings did not experience themselves as separate from the living world. The river was not merely water, the forest was not simply timber, the land was not property, and an animal was not an object whose value depended upon what it could provide for us. Life was understood through relationship, through the recognition that human beings were part of a much larger community of beings, each with their own presence, intelligence, nature and place within the whole.

This way of knowing the world has often been described as animism, although no single word can contain the many ways in which ancestral peoples have understood their relationships with animals, plants, land, weather, ancestors and the unseen. At its heart is a recognition that the world is alive and that we are not standing outside of it. We are embedded within it, dependent upon it and continually shaped by our relationships with it.

To live this way is not simply to hold a particular belief about nature. It is to allow relationship to become the foundation of how we live.

Much of the rupture of our time has come from forgetting this.

The rupture of relationship

Over generations, human cultures have increasingly separated themselves from the living world and learned to see it through categories of ownership, usefulness, productivity and control. Animals became livestock, property, workers, performers and commodities. Land became something to possess and develop. Forests became resources, rivers became infrastructure, and the lives of other beings became increasingly measured according to what they could provide for human purposes.

This separation has caused enormous suffering, not only to the beings and ecosystems subjected to our extraction, but also within human beings themselves. When we continually place ourselves outside and above the living world, we lose an essential understanding of our own nature. We become disconnected from the rhythms of our bodies, from place, from the other beings around us and from the experience of belonging to something larger than ourselves.

The consequences can be seen in the ecological crisis, but also in the profound loneliness, alienation and fragmentation that have become so familiar within human life. We have become extraordinarily skilled at controlling our surroundings while becoming less able to listen to them.

Yet the relationship has never actually disappeared. The living world has not ceased to communicate simply because we have become less capable of hearing it.

There remains an invitation to remember.

Why horses

Horses hold a particularly powerful place within this remembering because our history with them reaches so deeply into human culture. For thousands of years, horses have travelled alongside us, carried us across landscapes, worked with us, lived within our communities and participated in the changing stories of human societies. They have been companions, partners, workers, ceremonial beings and beings of immense cultural and spiritual significance.

But their importance does not come only from what horses have done for human beings.

It comes from who they are.

A horse encounters the world through an extraordinarily refined sensitivity to movement, intention, rhythm, proximity, tension, breath and changes within the environment. They are deeply social beings, continually orienting themselves in relation to others. They notice what is happening around them, and they respond to what they perceive rather than to the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing.

This makes relationship with a horse a profound encounter with another way of being alive.

A horse does not need us to explain ourselves. We can say that we are calm while our bodies communicate something entirely different. We can believe that we are offering connection while unconsciously asking for control. We can approach with the intention of helping while failing to notice that the other being has not consented to what we are offering.

The horse can make these contradictions visible.

Not by judging us, but simply by responding.

This is where something important can begin.

Beyond the horse as healer

It is tempting to speak of horses as healers, and there is truth in the experience many people have of being changed through their relationship with them. Yet even this language can carry the danger of placing the horse once again in a role defined by human needs: the horse becomes valuable because the horse heals us.

A deeper relationship asks something different.

If we are willing to receive something from the horse, what does it mean to become genuinely available to the relationship itself?

A right relationship is not simply a matter of taking and giving, of balancing what one receives against what one returns. Relationship is more alive and more mysterious than an exchange. It is an ongoing participation in one another’s lives, shaped by attention, presence, responsibility, freedom, boundaries, care and the countless things that cannot be measured. Reciprocity matters deeply, but it is not a transaction.

This takes us beyond the idea of horses as therapeutic instruments and into a relationship in which the horse’s life matters in its own right. It asks us to become interested in the horse not only in relation to what we may experience through being with them, but in the horse as a being with their own needs, relationships, preferences, history, rhythms and ways of knowing.

What allows this particular horse to flourish? What creates safety, freedom, companionship and choice in their life? What happens when we take their boundaries seriously, when a refusal is understood as communication rather than disobedience, and when their needs are allowed to influence the relationship as much as our own?

These are not merely questions of horsemanship. They are questions of ethics, and ultimately questions about what kind of human beings we choose to become.

Because relationship without reciprocity easily becomes extraction, even when our intentions are loving. And relationship that is reduced to an exchange of benefit and care still remains too small for the living complexity of what it means to belong to one another.

Listening before acting

There is a profound difference between interacting with a horse and entering into relationship with one.

We can learn techniques for handling, training and communicating with horses, and those skills can be valuable. But technique alone does not create relationship. Relationship begins when we become willing to encounter the horse as another living subject, with a perspective and a way of knowing that is not ours to control.

This requires a different quality of attention.

We begin to notice before we intervene. We listen before we direct. We become curious about what the horse is communicating instead of immediately deciding what their behaviour means. We allow silence to become part of the encounter. We begin to recognise that communication is happening continuously, often through things much subtler than words.

In this way, being with a horse has to become a practice of humility.

The human being is no longer the one who knows, teaches and determines what should happen. We become one participant within a relationship that has its own intelligence.

And something changes in us when we stop insisting that everything must revolve around our intention.

Healing with the more-than-human world

This is why I prefer to speak of healing with the more-than-human world rather than healing through it or from it.

Healing is not something a horse does to a human being.

It is something that can emerge within relationship.

When we spend time in genuine contact with another living being, our attention can gradually return to the body and to the present moment. We notice breath, movement, weight, temperature, sound, distance and rhythm. We become aware of our own state because another being is responding to it. We are reminded that our bodies communicate constantly, whether or not our conscious minds are aware of what they are saying.

A horse can therefore become a powerful companion in the process of coming back into embodied relationship with life.

But the movement is not one-directional.

As we become more sensitive to the horse, we also become more aware of the conditions in which the horse is living. We begin to notice whether there is enough space, rest, companionship, choice and safety. We become more attentive to the difference between what we want from the horse and what the horse is actually experiencing.

The healing becomes reciprocal because the relationship itself becomes the place of attention.

The wisdom of our ancestors

This way of being is not something we need to invent.

Human beings have spent the greater part of our existence living within intimate relationship with the more-than-human world. Before the increasing separation produced by systems of domination, commodification, colonialism and industrialisation, human life was embedded in relationships with animals, plants, waters, landscapes, seasons, ancestors and the unseen. These relationships were expressed differently from place to place and from people to people, but the fundamental reality was not abstract: human life depended upon and participated in the lives of countless other beings.

We should be careful not to turn this into a story of a pure past from which modern humans have simply fallen. Human history contains complexity, conflict, violence, care and contradiction. Yet the fact remains that the separation between human beings and the rest of the living world is not the original condition of humanity. It is a particular historical development, and one that has been profoundly shaped by colonialism, land dispossession, industrialisation and the transformation of living beings into resources and property.

For many peoples, these forces did not merely change an idea about relationship. They violently disrupted living relationships with land, animals, ancestors, language, ceremony and community. In many places, the consequences are not historical in the sense of being finished; they continue in the present.

Remembering this matters.

Because returning to relationship cannot mean taking knowledge from peoples whose relationships were attacked and placing it into another modern framework for our own use. It asks for humility about where knowledge comes from, whose lives have carried it, what has been lost, what continues to be protected and what it means to approach ancestral ways without appropriating them.

Our ancestors are not an idealised past to which we can simply return. They are part of the living lineage through which we have arrived here, carrying both wisdom and wounds, relationship and rupture.

Ceremony and remembrance

Ceremony can be one way of entering this field of relationship.

It interrupts the ordinary assumption that the world exists simply for our use. Ceremony asks us to become attentive, to acknowledge relationship, to make offerings, to remember those who came before us and to recognise that we are participating in something that began long before our individual lives.

Ritual can return us to a different quality of attention. It can slow the habitual movement of taking and doing and invite us into participation, listening and presence. It can remind us that we are part of relationships larger than the individual self, and that there are ways of acknowledging life, place, ancestors and other beings that do not depend upon explanation or control.

For beings whose cultural and spiritual traditions have been disrupted through colonisation, forced assimilation, displacement and other forms of violence, ceremony can carry profound meanings of continuity, survival, sovereignty and reclamation. Many traditions have endured through extraordinary efforts to protect relationships, knowledge, language, land and ways of being. To recognise this asks for care: these living traditions are not resources for others to borrow, reproduce or extract from, but belong within the peoples and relationships that have carried them.

We each carry ancestral histories, whether they are close to us or obscured by generations of rupture, migration, religious change, displacement or forgetting. Part of our own work may therefore be to approach those histories with honesty and tenderness, to become curious about what has been lost or transformed, to honour what can genuinely be remembered, and to find ways of restoring relationship within our own lives without reaching for what belongs to another lineage.

In this way, ceremony need not become an attempt to recreate something that has been lost or to imitate someone else’s way of being. It can instead become an opening into deeper attention, responsibility and relationship—a way of remembering that we have ancestors, that we belong to places and histories, and that our own lives can become part of the ongoing work of caring for what is alive.

Ceremony, in this sense, is not decoration around the work.

It can be part of remembering how to belong.

Our ancestors and the work of repair

To bring our ancestors into this work is not to idealise them. It is to acknowledge that we are the continuation of lives that began before us and that much of what we carry was shaped long before we arrived.

Our bodies contain history. Our ways of relating have histories. The stories we inherited about animals, land and ourselves have histories. So does the separation that we are now attempting to understand.

The question is not simply what we want to create in the future, but what has been broken, interrupted, suppressed or forgotten along the way.

What relationships were once tended that are now neglected? What forms of knowledge were violently interrupted? What ways of listening were dismissed, prohibited or made difficult to continue? What relationships with land and other beings have survived despite everything that was done to sever them?

There is no single answer to these questions, and there is no universal ancestral past waiting to be recovered.

There are many histories, many lineages and many forms of relationship.

Our task is therefore not to create a romantic image of what came before, nor to appropriate traditions that belong to others. It is to become honest about the histories we have inherited and to listen with care for the responsibilities they place upon us.

The horse can stand beside us in this remembering, not as a symbol of some lost past, but as a living being with whom relationship is possible now.

What we receive, and what we return

There is much that horses can awaken in us. They can draw our attention back into the body and into the present. They can expose the difference between intention and impact, between control and connection, between forcing a response and creating the conditions in which genuine communication can emerge.

They can teach us to become attentive to subtlety, to regulate our own presence, to respect boundaries and to recognise that trust cannot be demanded.

But what matters just as much is the relationship itself.

What becomes possible when we stop asking only what horses awaken in us and begin allowing the horse’s own life to matter fully within the relationship?

We may begin to understand that care is not something we provide in return for what we receive. We care because the horse is alive. We make space because their life matters. We listen because another being is communicating, not because listening will ultimately benefit us.

We can offer environments in which horses are able to experience meaningful social relationships, movement, rest, safety, choice and the possibility of expressing their own nature. We can learn their individual language and allow it to influence how we live alongside them.

And perhaps what we return most deeply is our willingness to enter relationship without needing to possess, define or use the other being.

This is where reciprocity becomes more than an exchange. It becomes a way of belonging.

A different way of living

Deeply lived animism is not a philosophy that needs to be placed on top of our lives. It is a way of allowing relationship to become the ground from which life is lived.

It changes the way we meet another being. It changes how we inhabit a landscape, how we understand our bodies, how we approach death, how we remember our ancestors and how we participate in the places that sustain us.

It asks us to move away from the question, What can this give me?, and toward a more relational awareness: Who is here? What is happening between us? What am I being asked to notice? What responsibilities arise from being part of this relationship?

That shift can change a life.

Not because animism offers another system of beliefs to adopt, but because it asks us to experience ourselves differently. We are no longer isolated individuals moving through an environment. We are living beings within a living world, dependent upon countless relationships and carrying responsibilities that extend beyond our own immediate needs.

Returning to belonging

Perhaps this is ultimately why horses matter so much.

They can meet us at the place where the human story of separation begins to loosen. They can remind us, through relationship rather than explanation, that communication existed before language and that intelligence is not limited to the human mind.

They bring us into contact with a form of life that is different from ours, yet intimately entangled with ours. They ask us to become present enough to notice, humble enough to listen and responsible enough to allow what we hear to change us.

And when we enter that kind of relationship, healing is no longer something we seek to obtain from another being.

It becomes something we participate in.

Healing with the horse.

Healing with the land.

Healing with our ancestors.

Healing with the living world of which we have never actually been separate.

This is not a return to an imagined past, nor an attempt to escape the realities of the present. It is a remembering of relationship as a way of life and a recognition that the repair of our world will require more than technological solutions or intellectual understanding.

It will require us to change how we belong.

To listen before taking.

To give without turning relationship into a transaction.

To recognise other beings as participants in their own lives.

To make room for reciprocity, freedom and difference.

To restore the relationships upon which life depends.

And perhaps, above all, to devote ourselves to becoming people who can live in relationship again.

The horse is not waiting for us to discover its healing power.

The horse is already living its life, sensing, responding, communicating and participating in the world.

The invitation is for us to become present enough to meet that life.

And from that relationship, hopefully, the work of repair can begin.