ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethics to study the ambiguous relationship between horses and leisure riders in riding schools. For Lévinas, ethics begins in the face-to-face relationship. Being bifocal, horses do not “face” humans in an anthropomorphic sense; however, deeply meaningful relationships emerge from the embodied horse–human reciprocity. The encounters at the riding school opens up the possibility of recognising a Lévinasian “face” in horses in a wide sense of the term, but the prevalent instrumental approach towards horses as learning tools obscures horses’ status as possible ethical others. The riding school thus creates a bifocal view of horses as both partners in embodied emphatic entanglement, and instruments that riders must learn to handle and control. The riding school as such works as an environment where these two opposing versions of the horse are accommodated so that the potential tension between the two perspectives is alleviated. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine alternative human–horse relationships by focusing on the situations at riding schools where equine faces are allowed to emerge.
