Veterinary care in anthropological perspective: Ethnoveterinary medicine and human-horse relationships

Evelien Deelen

This dissertation examines how horse owners in the American Inland Northwest recognize, interpret, and respond to equine illness within the cultural system of Western horsemanship. While medical anthropology has long demonstrated that human illness emerges through culturally informed processes of interpretation and meaning-making, scholars have rarely applied comparable frameworks to illness in non-human animals. This study addresses that gap by analyzing ethnoveterinary knowledge and illness interpretation in a multispecies context in which human caregivers must interpret the health of animals who cannot verbally communicate their symptoms.Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2025, this research combines immersive participation, participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and two online surveys distributed among regional equestrian communities. The analysis integrates thematic coding, cultural domain analysis of free-list data, and explanatory model analysis of equine herpesvirus (EHV) and its neurological form, equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy (EHM). Together, these methods examine how horse owners classify disease, recognize symptoms, and construct meaning around illness. The findings demonstrate that equine health emerges within a broader cultural system shaped by social networks, moral expectations of responsible horsemanship, and everyday horse-keeping practices. Horse owners organize knowledge of equine illness through shared cognitive domains, including infectious, non-infectious, genetic, and behavioral conditions. They draw on a pluralistic knowledge system that combines veterinary medicine, experiential observation, peer-based advice, and cultural traditions. Most importantly, illness recognition in animals operates as a fundamentally relational process in which caregivers interpret behavioral and bodily cues through ongoing interaction with individual horses. iii This dissertation makes three primary theoretical contributions. First, it extends ethnomedical theory to include non-human patients, demonstrating that processes of illness interpretation and explanatory modeling occur in multispecies contexts. Second, it introduces the concept of relational illness recognition to describe how caregivers diagnose illness through embodied familiarity and multispecies interaction. Third, it expands the concept of ethnoveterinary medicine by conceptualizing it as a complex cultural system that includes cognitive classifications, interpretive practices, and moral evaluations of care. These findings contribute to medical anthropology, ethnoveterinary research, and multispecies scholarship by showing how illness emerges through culturally structured relationships between humans and animals.

Veterinary care in anthropological perspective: Ethnoveterinary medicine and human-horse relationships

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details