Animal work, memory, and interspecies care: police horses in multispecies urban imaginaries

Abstract

Mounted police units around the world have entered social media, with the aim of bringing the police closer to the public. In this paper, I analyze the Facebook page of the mounted police in the city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. I ask how equine agency, animal work, interspecies care, and the relational networks of memory are interpreted, communicated, and performed on social media, contributing to the co-production of urban imaginaries. I approach the material as performances of animality and human–animal relations, concentrating on shared interpretations and representations of the horses and their agency. To be able to analyze human–animal encounters and interaction in urban space as they are experienced, imagined, remembered, and collectively shared, I suggest a novel concept of multispecies urban imaginary. Developing the concept widens the focus of understanding the multispecies nature of urban environments and includes animals in the experiences and perceptions of city space – where they belong.

All Creatures Great and Small: A Review and Typology of Employee-Animal Interactions

“…They also tend to hold low beliefs in speciesism—the belief that animals are inherently inferior to humans (Knight & Sang, 2020; Leach, Kitchin, Sutton, & Dhont, 2023). Instead, they profess agentic views of animals as autonomous and sentient beings with unique personalities, desires, and capacities (Holland, 2022; Oehler, 2021; Schuurman, 2021; Yam, Tang, & Lam, 2023). In short, though the work takes diverse forms, all champion the animals’ needs.…”

“…The second form of employee-animal interaction is the coworker relationship, wherein animals work with humans. This may entail either collaboration on the same task, such as conducting arrests in law enforcement (Hart, Zasloff, Bryson, & Christensen, 2000; Schuurman, 2021), or supporting patients in therapy (Cavalli, Carballo, Dzik, & Bentosela, 2019; Hüsgen, Peters-Scheffer, & Didden, 2022; Prothmann, Bienert, & Ettrich, 2006). Alternatively, animals support and supplement human work via their unique skills and capabilities.…”

“…As in animal-care work, individuals in these professions tend to recognize their animal coworkers as agentic individuals with unique personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. Human employees work hard to learn and interpret their behaviors and intentions (Jalongo & Guth, 2022) and take into account their past experiences, feelings, and actions (Schuurman, 2021). Medical-detection trainers, for instance, “build an understanding of the nuances of that dog's body language in order to deduce further information” (Holland, 2022, p. 266).…”

“…Interacting with animals as coworkers also influences public perceptions toward human employees and their organizations. Law enforcement agencies report that “public confidence in the mounted police and their horses is even greater than in the police force in general” (Schuurman, 2021, p. 1) because the presence of animals shifts public perceptions of power dynamics and creates a sense of approachability between citizens and police officers. Similarly, visitors to national parks evaluate rangers who work collaboratively with dogs for rescue and law enforcement tasks as friendlier and more approachable than those who do not (Hart et al., 2000).…”

Embodied Communication, Sensed Atmospheres, Joint Situations: Human–Horse Encounters from a Neophenomenological Perspective

“…It does so by addressing a very specific one: horseback riding. The specifics of the relationship between humans and horses mentioned above have rendered it a frequent object of scientific analyses in different fields of human-animal studies: mutually becoming with [5][6][7][8][9], animal work [10,11], wild/feral horses [12][13][14][15], animal welfare [16][17][18], to mention only a few important topics. Horseback riding is a suitable empirical example because it can be viewed at the micro level as a very intense and complex form of embodied trans-species communication, while at the macro level, it is embedded in the larger contexts of the relationships between humans and animals.…”