© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/�5685306-� �34�4�6 society & animals �5 (�0 �7) �07-��4 brill.com/soan Listening to Horses Developing Attentive Interspecies Relationships through Sport and Leisure Katherine Dashper Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom k.dashper@leedsbeckett.ac.uk Abstract The involvement of nonhuman animals in human sport and leisure raises questions about the ethics of animal use (and sometimes abuse) for human pleasure. This article draws on a multispecies ethnography of amateur riding in the United Kingdom to con- sider some ways in which human participants try to develop attentive relationships with their equine partners. An ethical praxis of paying attention to horses as individ- ual, sentient beings with intrinsic value beyond their relation to human activities can lead to the development of mutually rewarding interspecies relationships and part- nerships within sport. However, these relationships always develop within the con- text of human-centric power relations that position animals as vulnerable subjects, placing moral responsibility on humans to safeguard animal interests in human sport and leisure. Keywords ethics – horses – interspecies relationships – multispecies ethnography – sport Introduction Over recent years there has been growing academic interest in critically exam- ining human-nonhuman animal relationships and questioning how we, as humans, should think about, treat, and care for the animals who are important participants in our day-to-day lives. Whether as companions, working partners, farmed species, tourism attractions, or participants in sporting competitions, animals play important roles in human social relations, and so the nature of