Shared Skin: The Slow Intimacy of Horse and Rider

This essay explores the co-constructed sensory experiences between two species over time, offering a deeper understanding both of the multi-sensory nature and different scales of inter-species intimacy. A five millennia long intimate sensory conversation between humans and horses was integral to hunting, domesticating, taming, training, sacrificing, harnessing and – eventually – riding the once-wild horses of the steppeland. Domesticating the horse may be seen as slow intimacy and taming as faster intimacy. Horses have evolved to be more empathetic to us than most animals, including most domesticated animals, because of the close reading of our intentionality they have needed to develop since domestication. The historian’s window into past sensory experiences is usually mediated by language. But, this essay asks, what if it does not have to be? It shows how a feminist interspecies historian learns by listening, watching, touching and being with the subject. Feminist thinking can help challenge stereotyping by thinking about the intimacy at the heart of horse-human relationships.