Paper short abstract:

Wild horses live free in the mountains of Galicia, but are owned and managed by local community members. This paper explores the political ecology and political ontology of horse-human relations within a context of severe rural land abandonment.

Paper long abstract:

For millennia, wild horses have lived in the mountains of Galicia, a northwestern region in Spain that is currently affected by severe depopulation and rural abandonment. Although these horses range free for most part of their lives, they are nonetheless owned, their number managed, and they are occasionally looked after by local villagers, named besteiros (which in Galician language means owners of beasts, a vernacular name for these animals). Ethnographic and discourse analysis reveal the inseparable link between the work of these people, the wild lifestyle of the horses and the political ecology of "clean" mountains and lands. Despite variegation in their modes of relation, as shown by the cases of the mounts of A Groba (southern Galicia) and O Xistral (northern Galicia) presented in this paper, there is a shared political rationale behind this particular form of horse-human-land entanglement. In A Groba, having "clean" mounts is synonymous with safety and low fire risk - one of the main environmental threats in southern Galicia. In O Xistral, having them "clean" is synonymous with the economic sustainability of small livestock farms. According to the experience of these people, what is clean, is alive, is habitable, has a future. Through our analysis we reveal that wild horses, rather than "animal-others", could be seen as a kind of extended family with which besteiros maintain a relationship of affinity and reciprocity. They would be part of a political ontology that struggles against depopulation and rural land abandonment.