RESEARCH/VALUE
What value does horse presence create?
Horse Presence began with a simple question:
What value does the presence of a horse create for a human being?
And then a second question:
Can that value help sustain places where horses live?
We are interested in the experience itself: in the meaning people find in being with horses, in the relationships that grow through repeated encounters, and in how these experiences can shape our lives over time. We also want to explore how the value of these relationships might be sustained and translated into the social and practical conditions that allow horses to continue to have a place in our world, not as animals to be discarded or slaughtered, but as living beings whose presence matters.
We do not begin with the answer.
We will investigate.
1 · Human value
What happens for a person in the presence of a horse?
We will look at the value people experience themselves.
Emotional value
What happens emotionally?
Psychological value
What happens in thought, attention, self-awareness, regulation, confidence, or other aspects of psychological life?
Nervous system and physiological value
What happens in the body?
Where appropriate, we will measure what can be measured.
Experiential value
What is the experience itself worth to the person?
Meaning and personal value
What significance does the experience have for the person?
The person's own account matters.
We do not decide beforehand what an experience means.
The same value?
After a session, does the presence of one horse feel more valuable than the presence of another? Or does the presence of each horse have the same value?
We ask. We do not decide beforehand what the answer should be.
2 · Developmental value
What can develop through repeated experiences with horses?
A single encounter and a sequence of experiences are different questions.
Across repeated experiences, we are interested in whether capacities can develop, including:
- Care
- Attention
- Communication
- Creativity
- Social connection
- Leadership
- Self-regulation
- Confidence
- Empathy
- Patience
- Boundaries
- Responsibility
- Problem-solving
We do not tell people that they are here to develop these qualities.
We want to discover what actually develops.
The eight-experience Pilot
The eight experiences allow us to ask a larger question:
What changes when a person returns to the presence of horses repeatedly?
The research will follow the person across the encounters while allowing each experience to remain what it is.
3 · Value over time
How does the value of horse presence unfold?
Value does not have to last forever to be real.
It can be:
- Immediate
- Temporary
- Recurring
- Cumulative
- Changing in form
- Remembered later
- Carried into another part of life
A single experience may have value.
A repeated experience may create another kind of value.
Something may matter deeply for a short time.
So we do not use persistence as a definition of value.
We ask:
What happens afterwards?
How does the value unfold over time?
4 · Social & cultural value
What happens when the value of horse presence becomes shared?
The value of horses may extend beyond the individual experience.
We are interested in questions such as:
- Can horse presence create social connection?
- Can it create new forms of community?
- Can it change how people think about horses?
- Can it change what people believe horses are worth?
- Can it create cultural value around simply allowing horses to live?
This takes the enquiry beyond:
What did this horse mean to this person?
towards:
What happens when a society begins to value the presence of horses differently?
5 · Economic value
Can human value become part of the economic conditions that sustain horse life?
This is one of the central experiments of Horse Presence.
A horse does not need to perform in order to have value.
But places where horses live require resources.
So we ask:
Can some of the value people find in horse presence become contribution that helps sustain those places?
We will look separately at:
- Experienced value
- What did the person find valuable?
- Economic capacity
- What could they realistically contribute?
- Actual contribution
- What did they actually contribute?
Contribution can take many forms:
- Money
- Time
- Work
- Land
- Skills
- Knowledge
- Equipment
- Protection
- Research
- Advocacy
- Relationships
- Introductions
- Permission to document
- Telling someone else
- Something else
- Nothing
We do not assume that value and money are the same thing.
The economic question is narrower:
Can some of the value created by horse presence help sustain places where horses live?
6 · Value for horses
What does this value create for the horse?
The horse is not simply the source of an experience.
Horse Presence also asks what the existence of the project creates for horses.
That includes:
- Living space
- Freedom of movement
- Social life
- Care
- Safety
- Resources
- The possibility of living as a horse
- Freedom to participate or not participate
The horse remains a horse throughout the research.
Its welfare and agency are part of the value system we are trying to build.
7 · The place
What does it take to create a place where horses can live?
A sustainable horse place depends on real conditions.
We will study:
- Land
- Grazing
- Vegetation
- Water
- Weather
- Infrastructure
- Care
- Veterinary needs
- Running costs
- Land per horse
- Human resources
- Seasonal conditions
Our Home Can Tigres is one particular place.
It will give us one real-world case to study.
It does not automatically tell us what every place would require.
8 · How we study value
We will combine different kinds of information.
- What people experience
- Their own words, accounts, responses and reflections.
- What develops
- Changes across repeated experiences.
- What happens in the body
- Where appropriate, physiological measures.
- What happens psychologically
- Using appropriate measures and research instruments where justified.
- What happens with the horse
- Horse behaviour, choice, participation, withdrawal, social relationships and welfare.
- What happens in the place
- Resources, costs, land, conditions and capacity.
- What happens afterwards
- How people use, remember, carry or act on what they experienced.
- What people contribute
- The relationship between value, capacity and actual contribution.
We would also like to gather and study books and articles, as well as clinical research about equine-assisted psychotherapy.
9 · Observe everything that happens
Observe everything that happens.
This is the research discipline.
Everything means everything:
the horse, the person, the relationship, the body, emotions, thoughts, memories, unexpected associations, environment, timing, things that seem connected, things that seem impossible to explain, interpretation, and the absence of anything happening.
We do not decide in advance which of these things will matter.
And we do not give participants a way of looking at their experience beforehand.
The participant experiences.
Horse Presence investigates.
10 · From experience to knowledge
Experience is where the enquiry begins.
It is not automatically an explanation.
- We will collect experiences carefully.
- We will document them.
- We will look for patterns.
- We will measure what can be measured.
- We will compare where comparison is appropriate.
- We will follow what happens over time.
- And we remain willing to discover that our first idea was wrong.
A person's interpretation belongs in the record.
It remains their interpretation.
The research does not need to decide for them what their experience meant.
11 · What are we trying to discover?
The questions we are trying to answer are on the Enquiry page.
12 · The larger experiment
The research connects the questions.
Horse life
↓
Horse presence
↓
Human experience
↓
Human value
↓
Developmental / social / cultural value
↓
Economic value
↓
Contribution
↓
Sustainable horse places
↓
More horse life
↓
More human value for life
This is not a model we assume is true.
It is the model we are trying to find out whether we can build.
13 · Replication
Would this happen anywhere else?
One place cannot answer a general question.
What we learn at Our Home Can Tigres is, first, about Our Home Can Tigres: this land, these horses, this weather, these people, this island.
Whether the findings hold elsewhere is a separate question. It means investigating somewhere else, with different horses, people and conditions, documenting what happens just as carefully, and allowing the findings to differ.
Until then, we have one case. We would rather say so than generalise beyond what the evidence supports.
