“Vile Horses”: Equine Gender, Deformity, and Ableism in Eighteenth-Century England

Mary Tefft White Cultural Center, University Library

In 1726 Jonathan Swift gave his views on the life trajectory experienced by many of England’s horses. He tells a damning tale of once-prized animals, famed for their fashionable racing prowess, who become lame and deformed due to age and over-work. These horses were then sold to conduct ever more menial tasks under the dubious care of the labouring classes, where they eventually succumbed to their poor treatment. Their bodies were then sold for their hide, meat, and sinew. This presentation will explore some of the many questions raised by Swift’s satire on the state of equines in England during the eighteenth century. Focusing specifically on one type of horse at the bottom of the human and equine hierarchy, the carthorse, I examine the interwoven discourses of deformity, gender, and care evident within period accounts of equine lives. In doing so, it becomes clear that gendered narratives of equine impairment (and the resistance to them that formed a core component of the eighteenth-century’s animal welfare debates) influenced period human-animal relationships and calls for human social and moral reform. Discourses of equine deformity, expressed within stories like Swift’s, were also inseparable from the discrimination and subjugation of those labeled as the ‘non-ideal,’ regardless of species. In other words, animals and humans of the eighteenth century existed within a larger ecological community where multiple species, and beings with diverse abilities and body types, were influenced by ableist thought that determined who was worthy of life, who should die, and who should be included under the category of cared for.