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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the role of labour in constituting cross-species kinships within Slovak horse-logging communities, emphasizing the ecological relevance of the practice and its capacity to reframe understandings of human–horse collaboration and work.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ongoing sensory ethnographic research among Slovak horse-logging communities, this paper explores multispecies kinship (Haraway, 2016) as a relational practice that takes shape through everyday human–horse collaboration in forest work, in landscapes marked by ecological injury and loss. Rather than approaching kinship as a symbolic framework, the paper traces how it is enacted materially and sensorially in the course of labour, through shared movement, touch, fatigue, and attention to terrain.

Horse-logging in Slovakia unfolds in forests shaped by irresponsible state policies and competing models of extraction and care. Within this context, the practice is often framed as a relic or folkloric reminiscence rather than as a contemporary, ecologically relevant form of forestry (Messingerová, Stanovský, 2009), even as it persists through cross-generational learning and the particular appeal of horse–human kinship. Horse-logging depends on fine-grained coordination between humans, horses, trees, tools, weather, and forest terrain. It is through these multispecies interactions that work is organised, and that questions of forest disturbance, animal welfare, and responsibility are negotiated in practice. The relationship between horses and horse-loggers thus emerges as both intimate and asymmetrical: formed through care, attentiveness, and sensory attunement, while simultaneously structured by ownership, economic constraint, and concrete material working conditions.

Against this background, the paper approaches regeneration ethnographically rather than as a policy-driven or abstract ecological goal. Regeneration emerges here as a situated practice that seeks regrowth and continuity within damaged environments, through attempts to sustain livelihoods and relations without reproducing the extractive logics that have contributed to environmental loss.