A world without horses

February 17, 2025

In 2022, History Colorado, in collaboration with CSU Spur, hosted an exhibit that looked at the horse’s role in helping shaping the region now known as Colorado. When researching The Power of Horses, staff asked individuals and community organizations across the state, “What would we lose in a world without horses?”

The question might not seem as pressing today as if it had been asked 125 years ago, when the automobile had not yet been invented and humans still depended heavily on horses for agriculture, transport, and war.

Still, given the rate at which agricultural and other largely undeveloped land is today sought out for housing and other human-centric uses, the question remains valid. Horses just seem to have fewer and fewer acres to roam.

So, I’ve been mulling over the question, asking myself, What if our world, and Colorado in particular, no longer had horses? What if?

For me, and I’m sure for many other people who love horses, the answer is clear.

While the majority of us no longer need horses to help plow fields and get where we need to go, horses are essential to our well-being. Many of us would deeply feel their loss on many levels.

I’ll talk here about the loss I’d feel if horses were no longer part of our landscapes across the western United States. I treasure seeing horses grazing, playing, or galloping, whether in lush fenced pastures or rugged wild country. Domesticated, feral, and wild horses remain integral to our world, and I highly value these precious scenes.

This emotional connection that I’m describing speaks to the concept of topophilia—love of place. Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, emeritus professor of geography at University of Wisconsin–Madison, popularized the term in his book Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values in 1974. Tuan studied the emotional bonds that people build with their physical surroundings, including cities, countryside, and wildlands, and how a person’s attitudes and feelings toward a particular place are influenced by environmental and cultural factors.

That people have emotional bonds with places makes sense to me, but back when Tuan published his book he was exploring and helping shape a relatively new area of study that came to be known as humanistic geography. This field of study looks at how people perceive, experience, and give meaning to space, place, and landscape.

I love and appreciate many different types of landscapes, including desert, mountain, and coastal. I do, however, have an affinity for landscapes where horses are present, and of these they evoke different emotions in me. Bucolic scenes where horses graze make me peaceful and content. Wild vistas where horses roam at will stir in me feelings of freedom and adventure. All landscapes that include horses help me feel grounded and centered—and I’d hate if they were to disappear.

In his book, Tuan dedicated a section to discussing how artists across the ages and cultures have expressed their appreciation for particular places through landscape art. This genre of art takes a wide, topographical view of nature. Even though humans, animals, buildings, and other elements might appear in landscape art, the natural environment is always the focus.

So works of art that celebrate the harmonious relationship between horses and western landscapes aren’t technically landscape art, but the idea that art expresses shared values concerning place and landscape still applies here.

Which brings me to the Coors Western Art show, held every January in conjunction with the National Western Stock Show in Denver. Here are a few pieces from this year’s show that capture this harmony in different ways.