In this project I explore the ambiguous moralities that bind young horses’ fates to practices of horse breeding, trading, and rescuing. In Austria, the so-called Noriker horse is being bred as part of a program to promote an environmentally friendly, extensive and “Umwelt”-protective agriculture. The Noriker horse is considered “endangered”, with a population of slightly less than 5’000 breeding animals. It is one of thirty-one livestock and companion animal breeds listed under the country’s native breed conservation program. Breeders of such animals, if they are farmers, receive government subsidies for their engagement in conservation breeding. In 2014, there were 3’351 listed Noriker breeders with a registered breeding population of 4’468 mares and 192 stallions (see Lederer/Wieser 2017, 572; ARGE Noriker Statistik 2017).
Norikers are an Austrian alpine heavy horse breed that has emerged in the late middle ages (12th century), as trade routes across the Alps gained importance (Saumhandel). In the 16th century, these alpine horses were crossed with noble horses from Italy and Spain, whose genetic influence continues to be visible in many a Noriker’s body shape and the breed’s outstanding color variants. Until the 1960s, over 80% of all Austrian horses were Norikers. With the decline of working equines in agriculture and forest management, however, their significance waned. The Noriker breeding association nowadays promotes them as a relaxed all-rounder horse for leisure riders but these horses’ heavy stature and impressive size is not to everyone’s liking.
Consequently, Norikers are primarily produced for the sake of preservation itself, that is, to keep alive the genetic lines of hundreds of years of alpine horse breeding. They are strongly linked to the cultural and religious heritage of rural alpine Austria. Annual breeding cycles are defined by seasonal activities such as the birth of foals in spring and the subsequent covering of the mares, early summer trekking of cows and horses onto high alpine pastures, annual festivities around stallion fighting, and autumn horse auctions, where surplus foals, mares, and stallions are auctioned off.
There is a downside to this kind of preservation breeding that comes by the lives of animals taken annually to protect the system at large. Hundreds of foals, in fact all who do not embody desirable breed-specific traits to enter the future breeding program, are disposed of each fall – “vermarkten” (marketed off), as breeders say. Male foals especially are surplus, a useless by-product of breeding and selecting for perfection. Of the 1’500 foals born annually, I estimate that 500 to 600 end up as meat, killed either in Austria, Germany, or Italy. There are no statistics on this estimate, except for the foal killings in Austria itself.
My research addresses that decisive moment every autumn, where almost all Noriker foals in Austria enter a state of liminality, in which it is uncertain whether they go on living or will be processed into meat. They all become potential “Schlachtfohlen” (slaughter foals) and many are not given names, highlighting that their lives are not in principal meant to be lived.
My research focuses on breeding practices with a particular focus on the annual horse auctions, on the age-old ‘skill’ of horse trading, on ongoing debates surrounding horse meat production, and on the practices of and motivations for foal rescuing that have emerged across Europe in recent years. As breeders, buyers, traders and rescuers live out their very specific ideologies of what it means to be human and what it means to be animal, horses’ bodies become battle grounds of ontological emergency.
The project is guided by three major objectives:
First, I explore what shapes and defines the moral positions and practical actions of horse breeders, traders, and rescuers in their relationship with horses and with one another.
Second, I explore what the annual conjuncture of foals’ possible life or imminent death signifies for individual horses, for human actors involved, and for the horse (meat) production system at large.
Third, I develop a methodological approach called socio-hippography that seeks to include equines as meaningful actors in ethnographic research. Their ‘voices’ and views shall be respected and their contribution to empirical insight acknowledged. The goal is to explore the potential for equine research participants to expand our understanding of what it means to be a livestock/companion animal at the edge of life and death. And to understand from an empirical basis how multispecies coexistence may be modelled on more equal terms.
