Socially engaged art practice and working equine welfare: creative methodologies for evolving how we see and attend to human-equine relationships

Socially engaged art is a recognized field of practice in qualitative research and is increasingly being applied to addressing the complex health challenges we face in today's world. Its use has received minimal attention in the animal welfare sciences, however, despite being well suited to exploring, understanding, representing, and challenging human experiences, behaviors, assumptions, practices and cultures. Where exploitation of the more-than-human world is concerned, socially engaged practices can disrupt systems of oppression and stimulate transformational learning. This has particular relevance for relationships between equines and their humans. Art that is socially engaged can co-create new knowledges, helping us to reshape our understanding of relational care practices. As recent research has shown, a shift from animal labor to multispecies care can thus be developed, as art practices enable viewers to reacquaint themselves with taken-for-granted contexts of animal work habits that have become normative. This paper reviews the literature on socially engaged practice for human-mule welfare, before presenting an analysis of the work of a photographer and an artist who collaborated on the development of guidelines for pack animal welfare in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, a publication that speaks across languages and cultures through text, photographs and illustrations. This analysis is supported by interview excerpts that explore the artist/co-creator Abdelaziz Haounti's philosophical approach to visual communication, which draws on his use of sketches and drawings to transcend the limitations of language, through its detailed attention to the somatic and energetic life-worlds of equines, conveying details that elude the propositional form. The analysis highlights how socially engaged art can articulate challenging questions in ways that engage the audience and raise awareness of the welfare concerns of mules working in the tourism industry. It is argued that these contribute to a deepening, albeit more complicated, quality of relationship. We conclude that art that thus engages with multispecies societies involving humans and mules has an important role to play in addressing systems of oppression and exploitation in mountain tourism and any resulting loss of freedom.