Intimate Knowledges, Mutual Becomings, and the Practising of a Response-able Ethic of Care

In horse–human relationships, caring well is intertwined with mutual knowing and becoming. For horses residing at rescue yards, this implies an active process of learning to know the horses as individuals and as agents. In this chapter, we explore this process, using interviews at horse rescue yards in the UK as research material. We focus on the significance of learning to know a horse to being able to care with them well and on the role of equine agency in shaping the practicing of response-able interspecies care. By bringing together recent discussions on care, animal agency, and human–animal relationships, we investigate the unfolding process of learning to know the other. The potential for successful practising of a response-able ethic of interspecies care, as we show in the analysis, relies on the agencies of both human and horse in shaping the emerging embodied interaction and enabling a mutually rewarding relationship to emerge.