When I was ten years old, my homeschool co-op was giving away horse books. Not nonfictional books– I’m talking about Saddle Club, Thoroughbred, Katie and the Mustang, like an entire Kickstarter set into equine fiction.
And you can probably guess who got to come home with all of the books no one else wanted.
From there, I became an equine fiction connoisseur. I dug through Everand (when it was Scribd, that is), my library, my Kindle, in search of horse books.
And the horse stories I enjoyed the most were not necessarily the stories about a human and their pony– sometimes the stories are tales from the horse’s point of view. They were also the ones that annoyed me the most.
Why the Horse’s POV is so Hard to Write Well
It’s all because of one very long word: anthropomorphizing.
Your brain is probably flashing warning signals at that word. Don’t click off this page! Anthropomorphizing (Ann-throw-po-more-fye-zing) just means giving things a human conscience or human abilities that they wouldn’t normally have. So when animals are given human abilities and wants (such as the guinea pigs in the movie G-Force, or the chipmunks in Alvin and the Chipmunks) they are called anthropomorphic.
What’s this got to do with horse stories? Well, since we’re humans, we can fall into writing animals into boxes that honestly, they wouldn’t care about.
While I know we can’t write everything the way a horse feels or sees (for instance, horses are actually severely color-blind and can only see a few shades. Their world is mostly gray. I’ve yet to see a story that actually includes this) for the sake of the story, I think writers can learn to write a horse’s POV that can at least give the idea of what it’s really like to live inside a horse’s head.
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#1 What Would a Horse Want?
“Uh, Allie, why are you showing a picture of Spirit? Isn’t he one of the humanized horses in fiction that we know of?”
Okay, hold on. Actually, the movie Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is an excellent example of how a horse story can be from the horse’s POV and still be entertaining AND fairly accurate.
It all boils down to a horse’s motivations.
Spirit (or as his friend Little Creek calls him, “Spirit-Who-Would-Not-be-Tamed”) wants to get back to his herd after he’s captured by the army. What has been made cliche by a thousand movies afterward trying to be the next Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron works in this movie, because it’s actually a logical motivation. For a stallion, as protector of the herd, he bears responsibility if his mares are injured. Not to mention that they can be taken by other stallions who will kill his foals so that the mares can have foals by them. A herd stallion wanting to get back to his mares and foals is very logical, because he’s grown up with the instincts and knowledge to understand the consequences.
Is the movie perfect? No. But the director did try to use equine motivations, and think like a horse.
“But Allie, if I’m always going by what the horse wants, I won’t have a story!”
Again, not necessarily. Think about Black Beauty. Beauty’s fairly passive as far as a protagonist goes, but it’s obvious that he wishes for a home with a fair master. Beauty doesn’t mind the work he’s given– he only wishes to be treated fairly, a right to be given to every living thing. His want is realistic because it’s not overly complicated or complex– what horse wouldn’t want to be treated fairly?
But we can’t just have a horse’s want in the story– we also need to have his actions and reactions.
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#2 How Would a Horse Act?
A horse’s actions over the course of the story are also important. You don’t want to have a passive protagonist (although in instances like Black Beauty, it can work)
I’m going back to Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron for this example. Throughout the story, Spirit is actively trying to find an escape to get back to his home. However, every time he finds an opening, his actions change. He doesn’t just accept Little Creek because he freed him from the soldiers– a horse can’t understand a human’s actions and thus won’t seek “friendship” for one good deed to another (now, in the movie Spirit actually holds a grudge because Creek also captures him, but I think you understand the point). If a horse takes an action, but it would actually go against every single instinct in that horse, you’re breaking POV.
This was one of the biggest problems I had with the novel A Horse Called Sky. At the climax, Sky breaks open the pens trying to free his family. I was broken from the action of the story and stared at the pages, wondering one, how would a horse have the logical capacity to think “Oh hey, my family is trapped behind wood, I should create a very clever distraction plan and smash these boards”? And secondly, this horse was wild, and he walked straight into a camp to save his family. After he had repeatedly been mistreated by humans. His mental capacity to create a plan of that magnitude and carry it out, as well as instructing other animals, went far beyond what could be realistic.
In Spirit, there are some things that are a bit of a stretch– for instance, Spirit’s chase after Rain, and his escape from the train engine– but they are still equine motivations. And pretending to faint isn’t the most outrageous thing for an animal to come up with– I have a goat who plays dead every time I try to lead her by the collar.
So I’m not saying that your equine protagonist has to be passive, or that you can’t take creative license. It’s okay to stretch things a little bit. But do ask yourself– how would a horse come up with this?
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#3 How Would a Horse See This?
Horses are prey animals, which means that they perceive anything new to be a potential threat. The yellow slicker on the door flapping in the wind is a brightly-colored predator about to latch onto their head. The scrawny human trying to get onto their back is a creature akin to a cougar leaping onto their blind spot.
This is what always annoys me the most in horse movies. Everyone just leaps up onto the horse’s back like its all going to be fine and dandy– no! Jumping on a wild horse’s back is the guarantee for a death sentence. From the time they are small, wild horses know that one bite to the neck from a cougar means death. Some horses even learn how to roll so they can crush the animal beneath them.
So view the obstacles for your horse from his eyes. How would he respond to the human trying to put a saddle onto his back? If he’s a trained horse, he’ll accept it, because its familiar to him, but he may spook at the crinkling blue tarp his owner’s trying to get him to walk across. If he’s wild, he’ll probably shy, or if he’s the aggressive type, kick and bite.
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Resources
The best way to be able to understand what this looks like is to experience horse stories that execute this well. Here’s a list of media I recommend that show the horse’s POV excellently.
- Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (movie)
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (book)
- Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry (More specifically, the prologues) (Book) (honestly, I would recommend all of Henry’s stuff XD)
- Paint the Wind by Pam Munoz Ryan (book)
- The Horse Diaries Series. These are by a variety of authors and are set in different time eras, but I’ve yet to read a book that had an inaccurate equine POV.
- War Horse by Michael Morpugo
What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to equine POVs? What do you wish writers paid more attention to?