The Human-Horse Euthanasia Experience: Actions, Emotions, and Relationality during a Euthanasia Process

by Julio Roberto Maquilón Flores (he/him)

Introduction

During the summer of 2023, I carried out a short fieldwork in the Residencia Equina La Corona (Equine Residence La Corona): a place that works as a nursing house for retired horses, in Catalonia, Spain. While being embedded in different tasks with the workers of the place, I could observe how horses group themselves in herds and how people interact with them in relation to these social structures: when they take a horse out of its herd, he/she may behave anxiously (from a human point of view), but when returning him/her to the grouping it is possible to notice a relief in the horse. Even though workers deal with these changes of behaviour in relation to the herds in everyday circumstances, in this essay I approach a sort of unusual situation (a euthanasia) and how people and horses interact and perform actions together within the process of transition. Although I have not heard people of La Corona referring to this moment as a ritual, I will use concepts and ideas from Michael Houseman and François Berthomé (2010) about rituals to reflect on relationships in non-ordinary situations and paradoxical and patterned collective actions. I will also use the concept of Sympoiesis from Donna Haraway (2016), which refers to the creation of alliances between beings of different species, to highlight a specific form of human-horse relationship in the event.

Beginning of the problem

It was August 3rd at around 13:30. I was gathering excrement with the rake and the dustpan in the area of the oldest horses and the ones that need special care when suddenly I saw one of the owners of La Corona (I will call her ‘the woman’) and her daughter coming with their horse called Nescafé. They arrived close to a feeder (a squared and metallic structure to deposit hay and feed horses). I saw them from a long distance, and after around thirty minutes I approached them. I saw Nescafé laying down on the ground with a halter on the face, while the daughter grabbed the extreme of the rope. I asked what happened and the woman told me that Nescafé had a severe colic and, although the veterinarian has done as much as he can, he will not recover. So, they will sacrifice the horse. I felt goosebumps at that moment and could not avoid expressing my surprise. I looked around and paid attention to an element that I did not notice quite well (like if my gaze integrated something that I was ignoring): there were horses eating around the feeder.   
Anthropologists Van Gennep and Turner propose the term Liminal to indicate phases or moments of ambiguity in rituals, in which the status, role, or relationship of individuals is about to change: this transformation is not yet realized but in the process. (Turner, 1974; Van Gennep, 1960) Considering that these authors developed these ideas thinking of specific traditional rituals, scholars in theatre and performance studies such as Diana Taylor (2005) and Richard Schechner (2011) propose the concept of Liminality (a wider term) to refer to situations of ambiguity and shifting of the state of things in diverse contemporary events. For example, likewise in the Eucharist believers participate in the transformation of the bread into the body of Christ and when eating it their souls will become cleaner, in some strikes protesters may demand a change in the political structure of their society through street performances. These are moments of shifts, and they are ambiguous because the expected transformation is not yet achieved: it is a betweenness, a threshold, a time/space in suspense. Schechner and Taylor refer to these situations as performances where participants perform repetitive actions, which become different from everyday activities and are embedded in the liminal context (Taylor, 2005; Schechner, 2011). This approach to liminality that considers other events (not specifically traditional rituals) as sort of performances/rituals may be suitable for the case of this essay. 

A device for the death

Five horses were eating around the feeder. The woman told me that she and her daughter brought them to eat here because it is the herd that Nescafé is part of, and Nescafé may feel a bit calmer if they are close to him. The woman and her daughter were using their ethological understanding of the sensations that horses living in herds may have when they are with or without their groupings. They applied it in favour of Nescafé by making an interspecies dramaturgical device: the feeder was full of hay, so horses kept eating and stayed concentrated together within the same place (instead of scattered all around). The woman, the daughter, and Nescafé were close to them. In this regard there were two groupings in the space: 1) horses focused on eating, and 2) people observing a sick horse on the floor, talking about him, and sometimes looking to the entrance in case the veterinarian arrives: The space was organized for the euthanasia. 

The scholar Michael Houseman (2006) refers to rituals as special and paradoxical modes of interaction and action: ‘a distinctive way of enacting relationships’ (Houseman, 2006: 9). Returning to the idea of Performance/Ritual, it is pertinent to say that participants of the event perform actions in a non-ordinary context to generate a change in the state of the things. Houseman talks about actions that enact relationships, which implies that they provoke emotions, ideas, and behaviors of participants, and transform the ways in which they relate to each other. (Houseman, 2006) In his article Relationality, the author mentions that in rituals:

Non-human entities acquire the attributes of agency, becoming virtual subjects with whom a ‘relationship’ may be possible, precisely to the degree that the participants encounter with them is causally embedded in a network of interpersonal ties.

Houseman, 2006, p.3

This inclusion of non-human entities in relation to participants of a ritual may happen in different ways such as in religious contexts where animals represent gods or other ceremonies where animals are representations of people or shown as figurative images. For example, the classic works of Lévi-Strauss (1962) about Totemism where animals represent specific groups and communities, or the Balinese cockfight by Geertz where it seems that cocks are fighting but it is actually men. (Hartigan, 2021; Geertz, 1973) So, to not mention these entities in a symbolic or represented manner, and to engage deeply with the interspecies case that I address in this essay, I draw on the concept of Sympoiesis (which means making-together) by Donna Haraway (2016). This idea, which implies the alliance/collaboration/cooperation between different species, may be identified in creative practices such as in the arts, sciences, and other communitarian contexts; where humans and non-humans create entangled, affective, and responsible bonding: multispecies relationships (Haraway, 2016). In this case, I address this concept to approach the relationship human-horse as key in the event, and to see how the actions are related to these associations.    

The moment of the euthanasia

We saw a pickup coming from the entrance. They arrived: the other owner of La Corona (I will call him ‘the man’, who is also the woman’s husband and the daughter’s father) and the veterinarian got out of the vehicle. This last one prepared the ‘medicine’ at the back of the vehicle and the man waited for him. While holding an injection, the veterinarian approached the woman, the daughter, and Nescafé; and the man came behind him. The man asked the daughter to give him the rope (the extreme of the halter of Nescafé) that she was holding. At the moment of this encounter, I walked a bit far from them: I came closer to the pickup and watched them from a larger physical distance. 

From my perspective, there was a pharmacological feature of this performance/ritual that gave special qualities to the actions: these qualities involve different ways in which people touch, approach and even talk to the horse (in comparison to daily situations that I witnessed in the field).  The Greek term Pharmakon, which unifies the contradictory double meaning of cure and poison (at the same time), resonated within the paradoxical and patterned behaviours: the veterinarian started by caressing Nescafé with one hand while grabbing the injection with the other. He alternated between touching and looking at Nescafé and preparing the position of his hand to insert the needle. The woman, the daughter, and the man were together in a standing position while the veterinarian, in his almost squat posture, started applying the poison to Nescafé’s neck little by little. The effect came immediately: Nescafé’s head fell with just a small portion of liquid, but the man held him with the rope and the halter. Nescafé raised his head and accommodated his body on the ground in such a way that his neck had a vertical position: he did not die at this point, he resisted the first portion of the dose.

While the veterinarian applied more medicine, the woman started saying words to him: ‘Gracias, cariño. Gracias por todo, rey.’ (‘Thank you, darling. Thank you for everything, King.’) What are these new elements appearing? According to Houseman, ‘Ritual discourse is used less to convey information than to accomplish certain acts.’ (Houseman, 2006:2) It may imply that words in rituals, beyond communicating information or messages, they rather enact dispositions: and generate sensations and emotions, affecting participants of the event. Considering that many of the actions were performed to ensure the calm of Nescafé during the euthanasia, the speech of the woman did not communicate anything to the horse, but it was expressed to produce something in him. It appeared at a key moment: when Nescafé started falling (when he started to die). The veterinarian continued injecting his neck, making pauses, and continuing. Nescafé kept resisting by letting his head fall, which made him balance on his side and raise his legs but returning to try to keep his neck vertically. The woman continued speaking and the daughter started to clean the teardrops of her face with her t-shirt. The contradictory relationship between poisoning the horse and nurturing/supporting him is displayed throughout the sequence of actions, and the emotive expressions increase when Nescafé became weaker.

Berthomé and Houseman state: ‘We should expect emotional expressions to emerge at key moments of ritual repositioning.’ (Berthomé & Houseman, 2010:58) Ritual repositioning, is a term related to Turner’s ideas of how social roles and identities shift during a liminal process (Turner, 1974). In the case of the euthanasia, Nescafé’s state was progressively changing to a possible death, and the others around were continuously affected and responded to the horse in different ways. Drawing on Berthomé and Houseman’s citation, it is possible to state that emotions have their time to appear within the sequence of the ritual: they are patterned and performed according to the moments of the event. It was visible in the way in which people added new actions and emotions in relation to how Nescafé was close to death. After a few minutes, Nescafé fell and did not rise anymore but remained immobile. I thought that he finally died, but people were still looking at him attentively. The veterinarian touched one of Nescafé’s eyes and said that it was still moving. Then, he went to the pickup to grab another injection. At that moment I heard that the first one was to make him fall asleep.   

While the veterinarian went and came back, people marked a short but clear moment of silence, in which the chewing of the horses around the feeder felt loud to me only at this point. The veterinarian approached Nescafé with the injection, and the woman, the man, and the daughter went down in a kind of squat position. They caressed Nescafé while talking to him and crying together. The veterinarian removed the injection and the three people remained touching Nescafé. Again, a short moment of silence: I heard the strong chewing of the horses and very weak mourning from the woman and the daughter. We waited a bit. Suspense. The man, the woman, and the daughter embraced briefly. At this point, Nescafé was already dead. I felt that at that moment I should approach and express my condolences, but I did not do it immediately. The man went away to get some tissues for the woman. I approached to hug her, and she smiled at me and said thank you: the euthanasia was over. Although afterwards, other things happened related to the corpse in a more ordinary manner (from my perspective), I need to stop the narration here and let the reader stay with this part.   

Final reflections on relationality

Through the patterned and paradoxical actions that people performed during euthanasia, it is possible to consider this moment as a ritual. However, it is not a traditional and cathartic ceremony like the ones that are usually conveyed in academic texts on ritual practices. (Turner, 1974; Van Gennep, 1960; Houseman, 2006; Berthomé & Houseman, 2010; David, 2009; Bell, 2021) Although in this situation people added emotions according to the moment that Nescafé was closer to death (a sort of a sequence towards a climax), they did not do it to achieve relief or liberation of their mental or emotional states. Even though they cried and their faces changed from the beginning to the end of the euthanasia, the purpose of the event was not a cathartic ritual (in the sense that Aristotle refers to the function of the Greek tragedy) because, instead of performing to alter emotions of human participants, their target was the peaceful state of Nescafé: a horse that needed to relax and which its only possible transformation was to stop living. The linkage between people and horses gives a form to the manners of performing the patterned and paradoxical actions that Houseman and Berthomé talk about. In this case, the sympoietic relationship (affective interspecies bonding), may complexify the concepts by approaching other possibilities of relationality. 

Conclusions

I selected the most relevant part of the event (that I considered) to convey in this short essay and briefly analyse the complexities of relationships in a non-ordinary context. Through approaches on relationality, emotions, and actions in ritual practices by Houseman and Berthomé, and by considering the interspecies linkages of this case, it has been possible to reflect on patterned and paradoxical behaviours of people that organize a peaceful death/goodbye to a horse. In this regard, the euthanasia of Nescafé may shed light on approaching relationships of care that go beyond affinities or identifications in terms of species. At this point, it may be convenient to make some questions for future research: In which ways do humans and non-humans create affective and responsible bonding? How can these relationships be studied by focusing on movements and actions that they perform in ordinary and non-ordinary situations? What theoretical and methodological tools may be appropriate to understand their interactions without treating them as simple functionalist matters but engaging effectively with them? In which other ways do humans and non-humans behave during death moments and/or help to die the others? What can we learn from these relationships? Multispecies perspectives may be key to complexifying the frames on relationality that are usually conveyed in theories on rituals, performance, and patterned behaviours. There are many things to reflect on, to understand, and to contribute with new questions. 

Bibliography

Bell, C. & Kreinath, J. (2021) Ritual, in Segal, R. & Roubekas, N. (ed. or eds.) The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, Second Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Berthomé, F. & Houseman, M. (2010) Ritual and Emotions: Moving Relations, Patterned Effusions in Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 1(1), pp. 57-75.

David, A., (2007) Performing for the gods? Dance and embodied ritual in British Hindu temples. Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, 14(4), pp.83-101.

Geertz, C., (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Haraway, D., (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene, Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Hartigan, J. (2021) Knowing Animals: Multispecies Ethnography and the Scope of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, 123(44), pp. 846-860. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13631.

Houseman, M. (2006) Relationality, in Kreinath, J., Snoek, J. & Stausberg, M. (eds.) Theorizing rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden & Boston: Brill, pp. 413-428.

Lévi-Strauss, C., (1963) Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press.

Schechner, R. (2011) Restauración de la conducta, in Taylor, D. & Fuentes, M. (eds.) Estudios avanzados de performance. México D.F.: Fondo de cultura económico, pp. 31-50.

Taylor, D. (2005) Hacia una definición de performance in Picadero, 15, pp. 3-5. 

Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. New York: Cornell University Press.

Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.