horse gin

In fact, animal domestication very often does involve the use of manual tools, but of

a kind we have not so far encountered. They are tools of coercion, such as the whip

or spur, designed to inflict physical force and very often acute pain (see Chapter Four,

p. 73). Another class of tools consists of those attached to the animals themselves and

operated as part of their performance. Thus the ‘handling’ of animals is really a two-stage

operation in which the human master, through the use of the instruments of coercion,

aims to control the skilled tool-using performance of his charges. Indeed there is an imme-

diate and obvious parallel here with slave-driving: like human slaves, similarly compelled

to work through the infliction of pain, animals constitute labour itself rather than its

instruments (Ingold 1980: 88).