Discovering The True Nature Of Horses

Abby Letteri started her PhD with a simple aim—to bring together horses and writing, the two great passions of her life.

Abby, who graduates with a doctorate in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) next week, began writing her PhD proposal on the history of the horse–human relationship, but soon realised the topic was too vast for one PhD.

“It’s a 35,000 year-plus history: watching horses, hunting horses, taming horses, riding horses, cultivating our fields, transporting goods, going to war with horses.

“There was so much there that it simply wasn’t going to be possible for me to cover it all, and I had to figure out what was most important to me.”

One day, Abby was sitting in her paddock watching her own horses, and she realised the impact domestication has on the horses’ wellbeing and natural ways of living.

“We don’t allow horses to choose their own social lives. We don’t generally allow them to live in herds, except for in groups of our own making. We separate foals from their mothers when they’re quite young. We don’t let them grow up and live in family bands, which is more natural for horses.

“We manage their lives quite prescriptively, and consequently, they lose the ability to speak amongst themselves, and they exhibit a lot of the same behaviours that people do when under pressure.”

She began to consider the status that horses have in the human world: animals who are not pets, and not agricultural livestock, but something else entirely.

“Horses live in this liminal space where we revere them on one hand, and on the other hand don’t think twice about using them however we want."

Abby decided to focus on discovering who horses are on their own terms, outside the confines of domestication, to better understand the impact humans have on the lives of horses. She travelled for nearly two years studying wild and free-living horse populations across the world, including in the Outer Hebrides, the United Kingdom, and the Gobi Desert, where the world’s last truly wild horse species lives.

She worked alongside ethologists to study the behaviour of these horse populations, which helped her develop an understanding of who horses are and what matters to them.

She says slow looking and deep observation were key to this process.

“There’s the science of it, but there’s also the art of it, which is practicing a level of mindfulness and being extremely aware of our own projections. Just really interrogating how much of what we see is coloured by who we are and where we’ve been, our own histories, our own prejudices—all the lenses through which we see.”

Her resulting thesis, Waiting for the Light: Considering the Horse in the Human World, interweaves memoir, critical commentary, and prose poetry into a book that examines how horses have been perceived in the human world, and how this has affected their lives.

She hopes her work encourages readers to consider the impact human behaviour has on horses.

“I think it’s incumbent on us, when we have horses, however we use them, to do that in a way where not just their welfare, but their wellbeing, is considered.

“This means enabling, to whatever extent is possible, them to have intact social lives first and foremost. It is about recognising the value of their lives for their own intrinsic worth, rather than simply as tools for our use.” These ideas, Abby says, can relate not only to horses, but to any marginalised population.

Abby had previously completed a Master’s in Creative Writing at the IIML, which became down they forgot: a memoir, but had not studied for several years when she began her PhD. She says completing a PhD in her 60s meant she was constantly presented with new challenges, but every one of them was worth it.

“There were times where the mountain was too big and I couldn't see the top of it, and I couldn't see the shape of it. I don't think you ever see the top, but I think what happens is you just keep going and you start to see the shape.

“If you were to see the top, what would be the point? I think the whole point of doing a PhD is to learn how to think—think creatively, think broadly, think deeply.

“This pushed me so far out of my comfort zone, but every single place I visited presented a new experience and just lit me up. I have never felt so alive.”

Abby is now exploring publishing avenues for her PhD thesis. She has also been spending time researching horse populations in Scotland, Portugal, and Spain.

“I’m thinking about another book that will focus more specifically on free-living herds of horses in rewilding projects and conservation grazing. Which is another way of saying, I can’t stop!”

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