Emotional Natives: The Role of Prey-Animal Ontologies in Equine-Assisted Personal Development

Abstract

Abstract In the psychological literature on the efficacy of equine-assisted therapies, it is common to read that horses are suitable for such work because of their evolutionary inheritance as “prey-animals,” making them highly attuned to the emotional states of others. Yet this assertion is rarely questioned. This article explores prey-animal ontologies within an ethnographic study of an Equine-Assisted Personal Development (EAPD) center in England, and how they helped facilitate client interpretations of individual horse behaviors. I argue that in this EAPD, prey-animal ontologies constructed horses as highly skilled “emotional natives” with significant, almost deistic powers. In some ways this was progressively relational. However, in other ways, it inscribed a problematic anthropocentrism, with the horse conceived as almost permanently in response to human agency. Moreover, it was sometimes empirically difficult to sustain. Prey-animality, then, in EAPD, both challenges and reinforces human power relations with horses in complex ways.