ABSTRACT
In this article ideas, attitudes, and ethical arguments legitimising different ways of teaching horses to interact without tack are explored and analysed. In new practices in liberty dressage, questions from (at least) three different theoretical discourses – behaviourism, posthumanism, and animal rights theory – come into play in discussions on training methodology. Methods of negative and positive reinforcement create negotiations between ideals of becoming together vs. the horse’s autonomy, mechanism vs. relationalism, and egalitarian vs. asymmetric ethics. In this practice it is discussed how the will of the horse should be interpreted, to what extent the will of the horse should be taken into account, what kind of power structures are ideal, and how the relation between horse and human should be understood.
