Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World by Abby Letteri
The stunning painting on the cover of three horses, standing on the graceful curve of a hill, drew me in to read Perfectly Themselves. Horses in the Human World. It was gifted to Abby Letteri, the author, by a friend.
As I turned the pages, I was captivated by the profusion of photographs of horses, from a variety of sources, but many taken by Abby herself.
Perfectly Themselves is the story of her year-long journey to observe free-living horses in Aotearoa, the Outer Hebrides, Iceland and Mongolia and to see for herself how different their lives are when they are allowed to live freely with their own kind.
She looked intently at how they built and maintained social bonds, how they moved in unison, and how they communicated with each other.
But Perfectly Themselves is more than a fascinating travelogue by someone who is passionate about horses. It is also a scientific journey informed by ethnology, a behavioural science based on the observation of animals in their natural habitats. Although Abby is not a trained ethnologist, the principles of ethnology inspired her to study wild, free-living horses and to see for herself who horses are when they are at home, their natural adaptive behaviours, and their social and emotional lives.
In her book, she also takes a deep dive into the long and complicated history of how the human-horse bond developed from the very beginning.
It is also a personal memoir. Woven throughout her narrative are stories about her own relationship with horses, how she developed a passion for horses from an early age, went to riding school as a teenager, acquired her first horse when she was in her late forties, and how she went on to buy a twelve-acre smallholding to graze her horses on. She also writes about her personal battles with rheumatoid arthritis and how much pain it caused in her joints, which eventually impacted her ability to do the farm work.
After a year of travelling to observe free-living and wild horses on three continents and four islands, she was persuaded that change needs to happen in the ways humans work with horses. She writes:
Their strength, speed and endurance have helped shape the human world, often at great cost to them. For most of that shared history they have been our captives, and that truth asks something of us now: to notice it, and to do better with horses in our care.
I found Perfectly Themselves, Horses in the Human World a captivating read which was hard to put down. Abby is a great storyteller and has the ability to paint beautiful pictures in words, e.g., in Mongolia, where she was part of a group of the first ‘international tourists' to visit Takhintal to observe takhi horses in their ancestral homeland, she writes:
The horses are resting, moving in and out of cloud shadow, the sun streaking their backs, their tails to the hot wind. As we pull out, I spot another ger on another slope far away across the valley, perhaps home for this small band -and then the hill closes in around us like the pages of a book, and the land has changed again.’
Reading Perfectly Themselves, Horses in the Human World made me reflect and deepened my understanding of who horses really are, and of the need for humans to respect that and find better ways to care for them so they can thrive.
Review: Lyn Potter
Te Herenga Waka University Press
