The Horse and Its Spaces

A – Space: an encounter between horse and man

Physical space is the operational terrain of living things: if we act upon this

space, it bears the mark of our will, it becomes ours, because we have modified it.

Yet there is not one space, but spaces corresponding to different species, different individuals of a species, and the various sensory inputs of any given individual.

Moreover, a species does not live alone in a given zone, but in community with a number of other organisms, who are also exchanging signals. Men and horses thus find themselves sharing the same ecological niche. it needed only an interaction between the two species for there to exist, in their respective universes, a common element, mathematicians would speak of ‘intersection of two sets’.

Man, thanks to his stage of evolution, possesses the capacity to penetrate the relationship of cause and effect existing between signals given off by horses and their behaviour, and the horse, being made suitable for domestication by an enlarging of the selectivity of it’s releaser signals, these two have been able to communicate with one another and establish commensal, and even symbiotic, relationships.