or How I Became a Horse
2026/08/16
Word count: ~4500
Reading time: 16-20 minutes
One day I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I'd become a horse. Where I usually expected to see a bison, I now hoped to see a horse, which was very unexpected.
I should probably clarify here, that the change didn't happen overnight - only the realization. I'd been pretending to be a pony for a while now. I just never thought it'd end up feeling like anything other than pretense. That it'd end up feeling natural. That it could feel natural.
Now, why would anyone pretend to be a horse?
There are lots of reasons, when you really think about it. I mean, kids do it all the time. And I think my reasons were the same now, at age 27, as they were at age 7: It was fun.
At this point I had firmly decided that I was done having awakenings of the selfhood – that is, awakenings related to my self-perception, such as kintypes, as opposed to awakenings related to my relationships, such as hearttypes. I had my bison theriotype, my gnoll kintype, and my Ben 10 fictotype, and I felt like that was more than enough facets for one person. But you all know how this goes. The moment you say you’re done, a new awakening happens. It feels almost like a universal law. To assert that you’ve concluded anything about your identity is to dangle a carrot in front of fate. I sometimes wonder if I should’ve just kept my mouth shut, and not tempted the powers that be, because figuring out a new facet of yourself is always bothersome. But then again, I think the awakening the came out of this might ultimately be for the better.
I think “horse” was always hibernating somewhere at the back of my mind, waiting for the right conditions to awaken. But not in the way that “bison” was. I was a bison in my most recent past life, and I believe I have been a bison from the moment my present life was conceived. There is a bison within me, the same way there’s phytoplankton in crude oil. I was born with bisonhood, I just didn’t recognize it until I was 18, when a series of shifts forced me to acknowledge it.
My horsehood was not there from birth. Its construction began when I first sat on a horse at the age of 2, the construction is still ongoing, and to be honest, I don’t think I can stop it. My horsehood is like a psychological Winchester House, but instead of upsetting the spirits of the deceased, ceasing construction will upset Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
Not literally, of course. I don’t feel like I’m being haunted by fictional horses. But… no, in a way I do feel exactly like that. My horsehood cannot be separated from fictional depictions of horses. Though I’ve had contact with theriform horses since I could walk, that contact wasn’t continuous or daily. I spent every weekend at the local pony riding school from age 5-14, but my weekdays were spent reading horse comics, watching horse movies, collecting horse trading cards, and playing with my toy horses. Not even direct contact with theriform horses could fully protect me from the influence of the artificial horse.
I think my problem was that, in many ways, the simplicity of plastic horses made them more alluring than flesh and blood horses. A horse is an animal with its own needs and desires. It was born to eat grass, play with other horses, and survive long enough to procreate. It was not born to entertain the children of another species. Theriform horses are individuals and they can actually be somewhat boring. Whereas my DVDs of My Little Pony: Tales were objects tailor-made for the children of humans (whether the children themselves were human or not).
That’s not to say that my time at the riding school bored me. Of course it didn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t’ve come there every week for almost a decade. But I didn’t come there for the horses. Not really. I came there for the idea of the horse. I came there for the largely one-sided bond I had with my favorite lesson horse, who spent the rest of the week carrying around a dozen other children, as he had been doing for 15 years at that point. I came there to touch the mystical creature I’d been reading about in my fantasy books, the creature who was supernaturally loyal to its rider and could understand every word spoken to it, the creature who had more in common with a dragon of Pern than with the animal I rode around on. Not that I realized any of that back then. I was 8 years old and I loved horses. My “inability to note the contextual divide between the animals that shared our world and the ones that were invented to please me,” as Elena Passarello puts it in her book “Animals Strike Curious Poses,” made sure I saw no difference between Gnu, the weary old Welsh Mountain gelding who carried me on trail rides and ate mints out of my palm, and the magical horses that roamed the world of Bella Sara and fought against evil witches.
My mom could only afford two after-school activities. By age 14, I was committed to my art classes, but less so to the horses (and in any case, I was growing too old for a beginner’s pony riding school). So when I acquired an interest in photography, there wasn’t really a question of which activity to drop. At the same time, horse media was starting to feel juvenile. I was cynical, the way teenagers usually are, and was more interested in books about vampire wars than horse adventures. Though my interest never truly went away, it waned and grew more disconnected from the real thing, to the point that my sketchbooks were full of unicorns and centaurs, rather than attempts at depicting actual horses.
After I stopped attending riding lessons, it would be another decade before I allowed my interest in horses to resurface. A decade in which I awakened as a bison, as well as a few other things. But the bison is what’s relevant for comparison here, so it’s what I’ll focus on.
I’d considered myself a therian since I was 14, but I didn’t know my theriotype until I was 18, when my latent bisonhood finally forced itself to the forefront. One second I was trying to follow along with math class, and the next it was like I'd been transported into the body of a bison. I pictured myself wading through soft, green grass, feeling my heavy hooves and broad back working, smelling the summer air. And just like that I was back in my classroom. Crazy what the mind can do - I imagine it's the closest I've been to astral traveling. The 'vision' was so overwhelming I had to excuse myself, go into the hallway, and just breathe for a minute. I instantly understood what the vision meant.
Imagine going your whole life, feeling like something’s missing, but never knowing words like “yearning,” “longing,” “need,” or “hunger.” How would you even describe to other people how intensely you were missing something? That’s how I felt when I awakened as a bison. It felt like I’d been made whole.
There were parallels between the ways I reacted to my new-found bison identity and the way I’d reacted when my horsegirl identity first blossomed. To show their acceptance, my friends gave me a pendant in the shape of a bison skull, which I proudly wore – and wear – every day. Where horses and unicorns once had been, bison now overtook the margins of my notebooks. I bought plushies, figurines, artwork, and more. More, more, more. Books and fridge magnets and stamps. If I found a bison in the wild, I added it to my herd. But that was the difference between my horsegirl identity and my bison identity. I had never been forming a herd when I surrounded myself with horses. There was no self-recognition. “Horsegirl” had been a core part of how I viewed myself, but “horse” was something my mind focused on, not something my soul ached for.
Surrounding myself with other bison like me, even in plastic form, is a way for me to feel more at home with my surroundings. I have written at length about herd formation before, and I don’t think I can word it much better now than I did back then: “Bison used to migrate in herds of millions, split into bands of a few thousands, which yet again split into 'clans' of just a few dozen. Each clan was led by an old and wise leader who had survived the migration before, and remembered the route, or at least the general direction. A band of clans, or even a single clan, may roam alone for much of the year, but the bison's neverending wandering would always, eventually, unite it with the others, in a gathering of millions. Not a pilgrimage toward a destination, but a gathering at a meeting-point that was gradually defined over millions of migrations until all the bands and clans had overlapping travel routes.”
I could never describe horse herds with the same intimacy, because I don’t see theriform horses as herd members.
When I’ve had the chance to interact with a horse or bison, it has always been with a barrier separating us. A plain old species barrier, yes, as no horse or bison will ever see me as their conspecific (nor should they – you do not want a giant ungulate to be territorial towards you, in your comparatively tiny and fragile human-looking body). And a literal barrier, in the case of the bison, whom I’ve only seen from behind a fence. But more than that, I’ve come to recognize that there is a barrier in my own mind.
I can never escape the fact that I was raised by humans. I share their values and prejudices. Even when I’m consciously aware of my biases, the humans around me subconsciously reinforce them. Don’t think you’re free from human notions, just because you’re something other than human.
The first horse I remember loving was a Schleich pony that I got for Christmas, when I can’t have been more than 2 years old. If I had been born just four generations earlier, or in any of the hundreds of generations before that, I never would have seen a plastic horse, and I very well might’ve loved a flesh and blood horse before ever owning a toy one.
Many of us have been outright robbed of this relationship with real animals. Even if you’re one of the lucky few, like me, who grew up with cats, and started riding horses at 5, and got my very own rabbit at 8, it’s unlikely that you’ve interacted with animals unencumbered. How many of you have seen, up close, how a cat will tear apart a songbird? How many of you have seen a stallion in rut? How many of you have seen a rabbit eat her aborted fetus? Those modes are as much a part of the animal as its cuteness or majesty. Even I didn’t get to see my rabbit eat her fetus, as my mom deemed it too graphic, and shielded me from it, even though I’d been participating in the slaughter of meat rabbits for 3 years at that point. But the rabbit herself was not shielded from it.
The documentaries don’t show how cats injure songbirds and play with them before killing them. The documentaries don’t show horses breeding. Because people can’t remove themselves from those situations. People can’t quietly observe. And this all too often includes nonhumans with personhood. “An outrage,” they shout at the documentary crew, who didn’t save the songbird. “Perverted,” they yell at the crew trying to show animals in their unperverted nature, even when seeing perversion in animals is far more worrying than not seeing it.
I owed it to my pet rabbit to see her as she was – an animal acting like an animal, experiencing a miscarriage, and being more concerned with nutrient loss and predator attraction, than with honoring the dead or comforting the child of humans. My mom didn’t tell me until I was 25, and until then, I think I was somehow under the impression that rabbit cannibalism only happened in books and academic texts. If I had been born in the 1400s, and we only kept rabbits for meat, would my mom still have shielded me? I don’t know. But nonetheless I feel robbed of the chance to know my rabbit as she truly was.
I think anthropomorphism keeps most of us from truly knowing animals. And yes, you are most likely guilty of anthropomorphism too, animal born of human that you are. If you’ve ever thought of wolves is noble or tapeworms as gross or worms as simple or parrots as particularly clever, you’ve engaged in anthropomorphism. The wolf is no more or less noble than the tapeworm living in its gut. Nobility is a human concept. The worm takes actions that no parrot could ever perform, no matter how clever.
For a more specific example of the insidious nature of anthropomorphism, a dog does not need talking buttons to communicate with another species, yet people will praise button using dogs for their apparent intelligence. A dog pressing a button that robotically speaks the word “door” is no more clever than my labrador who paws at the door when she wants out. If anything, it speaks to the lack of emotional intelligence of the person who has a better understanding of their companion animal when it uses a translation button. I have seen people using those buttons for every animal, from cats to goats to guinea pigs. But I’ve only kept guinea pigs for 4 years, and I’ve never once needed a translator to understand them. They have different wheeks for when they want food, when they want company, and when they’re just chatting. If they’ve been in my lap too long and want to go back, they chatter their teeth and lift their heads a certain way. And they certainly don’t need a talking button to express the emotions of “happy” or “mad” which has to be the dumbest thing those buttons have ever done. Never mind the discussion of whether animal joy is equivalent to human joy, or if we should use more value-neutral words to describe the emotions of nonhuman animals. If we accept the premise that a nonhuman animal can feel joy, then they can certainly express it with their face and body, and any human – or nonhuman raised by humans – should be able to understand.
And yet… I don’t think I understand horses as well as I think I do. I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know how smart a horse is, to borrow the phrasing of Frans De Waal. No matter how well I understand them, the barrier is still there, and my horsehood remains in some ways artificial. That doesn’t make it any less significant than my bisonhood, which I like to think has some basis in reality. Honestly, the fact that my relationship with horses is filtered through many layers of anthropomorphism might, in a way, make it more interesting. Horses are as much an ethnological study as a zoological one. Maybe part of the reason is that horses are domesticated, so they primarily exist in relation to people. But my own horse identity only exists in relation to people. As opposed to my bisonhood, which is self-contained. Or, at least, as self-contained as it can be, when filtered through a human upbringing and a lack of direct contact with my conspecifics.
When I was offered an internship at a riding school earlier this year, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed their company until I actually stood there, brush in hand, grooming the winter coat out of an elderly pony with Cushing’s disease.
I haven’t always loved the ‘care’ part of animal care. I think that I, as a kid, only used my pets for entertainment and company. The relationship was hardly reciprocal. But as I’ve grown, I feel like I get more satisfaction out of taking care of them, than I do using them for my own fun and games. It may be a chore to have to brush a horse daily because he can’t shed his own wintercoat, but not to me. It’s never a chore if it’s an animal. But unfortunately I quickly learned that this sentiment was not widespread in the equestrian world.
I worked at the riding school section of the barn, but it was, first and foremost, a boarding facility for sport horses. And while I don’t for a second doubt that professional riders love their horses, I think there’s little reciprocity in the relationship. I saw people who loved their horses the way I loved my plastic horses. At once taking care not to scratch them, and playing rough games with them. Even the most well-bred sport horse in the world was not born with the goal of becoming a show jumper. The horse was bred with that goal, humans made sure it was put into the world with that goal, but the horse itself, the animal with its individuality and its own wants and needs, was not. The love that many owners have for their horses is completely unrelated to whether their horse loves them back. It’s one-sided. It’s parasocial.
At the barn, I worked closely with a draft horse who had chronic progressive lymphedema, as most draft horses do. She was the sweetest thing in the world, and 4 days a week I would shave her feathering, wash her legs, remove her scabs, and rub her legs in wound salve. As part of treating her legs, I had to wash them with a hose. She was scared of the water. I asked around, and the advice I got was the spray her until she stopped moving. This is a training method referred to as flooding, where the horse learns that it can’t escape whatever is scaring it, so it should just give up. Every horse at the barn had been taught like this. I instead taught her the way you’d teach a reactive dog, by holding the hose in front of her, asking her to touch it, and praising her when she did, until after a few months she would tolerate being hosed down.
She loved this kind of attention. But she did not love her reason for being there. Her job. She was brought onto the riding school as a physiotherapy horse, and she hated being ridden. It was not that she hated work, as I always had her full attention when I did groundwork with her. But when you put a saddle on her and kicked her flanks, she would try her best to bite your legs. So they shut her mouth with a flash noseband, so she could still do her job. I told people about her personality, her needs, and her issues, and it was strongly hinted at, that I was causing trouble. Shortly thereafter I lost the internship. I don’t know if I lost the internship because I advocated for the well-being and individuality of a horse, but the timing was suspicious at best.
The horses I saw were treated as well as any vehicle. Maintained and taken to the mechanic or vet when something got in the way of their work. But never treated like autonomous lifeforms. Only vehicles. And you don’t consider a vehicle’s opinion of you. You don’t have a reciprocal relationship with a vehicle.
I think once again being around flesh-and-blood horses, and this time both giving and receiving attention and friendship from them, made something ‘click’ within me. I love horses – the real animal, not the plastic version – so much. I love them. But I love them the same way I love cats and dogs and guinea pigs and houseplants. I’m not sure I can live a fulfilled life without them, but there’s also nothing unique about my relationship with horses, compared to my relationship with other companion animals.
Horses are complex individuals. And when I picture myself as a horse, there’s none of that complexity. The horses I took care of were distinct from the horse I saw within myself. And in a much different way than the bison within me is distinct from other bovines. When I’m around cattle, I feel like I’m around brethren who just have a different way of perceiving and processing the world than I do.
I felt at peace among horses. But I never felt like I was hanging out with my conspecifics.
I’d been exploring ponyplay for a while at this point.
Now, ponyplay is a kink, but for the sake of this talk we’ll only discuss the safe for work side of it. That’s the only side of it I’ve really engaged with, anyways. During ponyplay, a person takes on the role of a horse, and usually another person takes on the role of a handler. The greatest hurdle I’ve run into here, is finding a person who’ll act as handler. And I think I know why.
Dogs are common. Everyone knows how to handle a dog, so puppyplay is common. Not so with ponyplay. I think it used to be more common, when horses were an everyday part of society, and people had a social script for how to treat horses. Even if said script is more parasocial than truly social. From medieval times we have the story of Phyllis and Aristotle, where a woman convinces a man to wear a bridle and carry her around on his back as if he were a horse. By the 1600s we hear of witches putting enchanted bridles on men and riding them to their witches’ gatherings. From the 1800s we have dozens of photos of adults riding each other like ponies. Do you notice what they all have in common? The horse is a vehicle.
But when I’m playing this game, I don’t mind being a vehicle. It makes me feel powerful and elegant. I feel wanted. Like I have a purpose. I feel calm. Never has pretense come so easy. Maybe because, on some level, there has always been a little horse somewhere deep in me. Or, at least there has been, as long as I’ve had a concept of self.
And yet, I don’t consider horse a theriotype or hearttype. I think of it as a linktype. When I first mentioned that I’d developed an involuntary link as a horse, a certain bonobo cheekily told me that we already have a word for “involuntary links.” But I don’t think it’s that cut-and-dry.
I think we’ve been too busy dividing our shared experiences of nonhumanity into categories based on form rather than function. We’ve been too busy considering how it looks from the outside, instead of what it does to the animal person in question.
“Copinglink” was coined during a tumultuous time in our community (though let’s be real, when is it not a tumultuous time?). It was coined in response to roleplayers misappropriating the terminology we use to describe deep and integral nonhumanity. But back then we didn’t define our nonhumanity by intergrality. Instead, the word we used was involuntarity. But I think even the coiner of the term could agree that whether your nonhumanity is involuntary is much less important than whether it’s integral to how you view yourself.
So while I never chose to become a horse, and never reinforced it much, I still wouldn’t consider it a theriotype, because it’s not integral to who I am. I spent a decade removed from horses, and I was still recognizably myself. Take away horses, and little about me would change, except that I would no longer have horses in my life. The same can’t be said for my bisonhood. If you took away my inner bison, I don’t know who I’d be. Bison is my anchor. It’s the lens through which I perceive the world. It’s my skin and marrow and lungs. Horse is… like a costume I love wearing so much that I forget to take it off. So yes, I do consider it an involuntary copinglink. None of our terminology is set in stone. It’s all just feeble attempts at describing our various relationships with nonhumanity. And we’ve been nonhuman long before we had terms to describe nonhumanity.
I’ve been a horse as long as I can remember, but I wasn’t born with a horse’s soul, whether literally or figuratively. I latched onto horses as a toddler, but never the flesh and blood version. I latched onto the plastic horse in my toy box. My bond with horses was parasocial from the start, and when it finally became truly social, I found I could not relate to real horses.
I could now regret that my parasocial relationship damaged my ability to have a genuine relationship with horses, the same way I regret never knowing my pet rabbit as the wild animal she is. I could despair at the way being socialized away from certain animals has robbed me of ever being able to truly understand them. But why would I do that?
Theriform horses are complicated. They have welfare needs that are often ignored. They’ll never see you as one of them, and to let them see you as one of them would be dangerous. Theriform horses can hurt and kill therianthropic horses. And knowing that there are animals blessed with the fur and hooves you’ve always wanted can hurt you, the therianthropic ungulate. I can never have a purely joyous relationship with other bison. It hurts to know that I’ll never look like them. But not so with horses. My relationship with the plastic horse is joyous in all its artificial glory.
So yes, I’m a horse. But not a horse like you see running on the steppe or playing in the pasture. My copinglink is not the horse you know. I am the Uffington white horse. I am the horse sketched in the margins of a notebook. I am the carousel horse. I am the mustang that runs in people’s dreams instead of on the prairie.
Last month I went to a kink club, and a rubber pony was there. She let me try on her chemical smelling facsimile of a horse head, and I’ve never felt as much species euphoria as I did then and there. I was ready to cry when I looked in the mirror and finally saw myself.