Paper short abstract:

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 and interspecies care are interpreted and performed on social media.

Paper long abstract:

Relations between humans and animals in contextual practices are shaped by understandings of animality, embedded in different power relations. In this paper, I analyze the Facebook page of the mounted police in the city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. I approach the material as performances of animality and human–animal relations, concentrating on interpretations of the horses and their agency. I ask how equine agency, animal work and interspecies care are interpreted and performed on social media. In Finland, public confidence in the mounted police and their horses is high despite their low status in the police hierarchy. The presence of horses transforms the power relations between the police and the publics – by mounting a horse, the police seem to get closer to the citizen. On the Facebook site, the individuality and agency of police horses are acknowledged and, based on the type of their work, they are performed as different from other horses, suggesting a shared identity of ‘otherness’ with their humans. The horses are presented as ‘employees’ with fixed working hours, duties, statutory rest breaks, annual leave, and retirement. In this context, the dynamics in interspecies care practices are not limited to power relations between humans and horses, but extend to relations between humans, in a network where performances of interspecies care are contested. What is understood as care is up to debate, and controlling the debate provides access to discursive power and, potentially, to a right to define the police horse as an animal.