ABSTRACT
The horse’s utility in warfare is recognised by historians, and this has led to ‘a more positive view of horse soldiers’. A positive trend, in the field of Animal Studies, has been a growing interest in the nature and dynamics of the soldier-horse relationship. During The Great War, soldiers wrote about their horses in their letters and diaries, and actively sought out opportunities to make their horses’ lives easier. Thierman’s observations of the slaughterhouse in Apparatus of Animality are particularly relevant to discussion of the soldier-horse relationship. Thierman describes the slaughterhouse as an environment ‘where power relations affect/involve both humans and animals at the same time’. Key to the modern revival of the soldier’s horse is a sentimentally loaded assumption that all soldiers loved their horses to such an extent they would have died for them, and that the horses held the soldiers in equally high regard.
