IN Pakistan, English-language newspapers are mostly read in the big cities. Even there, many readers skim the headlines. Nowadays, the news is mostly bad and hope is hard to find, so, it is safe to assume, many do not go much further. News about small villages, places where life is not determined by the vagaries of urbanised existence, is often where city dwellers do not look. There are important stories in these places as well.
It is in one of these spots that you would have found a story about a man and a horse published a few days ago. According to the story, a 45-year-old herdsman named Mukhtar used to graze his cattle in fields in the jurisdiction of the Yousufwala police station in Sahiwal. Mukhtar’s life was spent among his animals, including a beloved mare that he had raised with affection. It was probably the sort of life difficult to imagine for those of us who spend our days surrounded by other human beings, traffic, Wi-Fi and all the rest of it.
The simplicity of Mukhtar’s life was interrupted when his relatives insisted that the mare be handed over to them. Despite Mukhtar’s opposition, his parents handed it over. Distraught, Mukhtar climbed an electricity pole and grabbed live wires. He died on the spot. His family, the same people who had been the cause of Mukhtar’s anguish, did not want a postmortem. No one knows what happened to the mare.
Many city dwellers who read such a story would consider it a tale of rural foolishness. Imagine caring so much for an animal as to take such action. Living away from animals, other than the crows, stray cats and dogs that eke out an existence in Pakistani cities, such affection for an animal is anathema. Smug as they may be, their conclusion is the wrong one. While it is undoubtedly tragic that a man chose to take his life for any reason, the fact that he did so for a horse should not be the subject of disdain or ridicule. It should, in fact, remind us of the extremely close relationship humans can have with other creatures. One casualty of urban existence has been the loss of this understanding and, with it, an appreciation of a whole non-human universe.
The assumption animals are unfeeling creatures is wrong.
Horses have played central roles in human lives for millennia. Humans have been domesticating horses for thousands of years. People living on the Eurasian steppes of what is now Kazakhstan first tamed them and began a story that continues to this day. Nearly all domesticated horses, including the mare whose loss led Mukhtar to take his own life, descend from a lineage belonging to the Volga-Don region around 4,200 years ago. After this, human life transformed, making long distance travel and different kinds of human settlements possible. For thousands of years, they have been a primary means of human movement, becoming entrenched in human culture.
Beyond utility, however, horses are special because they are intelligent creatures that can detect and respond to human emotions. In our human-centred world, we rely on verbal communication to tell each other how we feel, what we want, what we fear and so on. As a writer, I would definitely endorse the significance of words, but it is also true that our overreliance on them often blinds us to so many non-verbal sources of information and communication that can be far more accurate and honest.
This is where horses play a special role. Studies have found that horses can read human facial expressions and body language. One study found that horses could distinguish between pictures of people with angry and happy expressions. They found that horses looking at pictures of anger produced greater stress reactions. Other studies have shown that horses can remember the emotional state of a hum-an from a single encounter.
Naturally, then, horses can have close emotional connections with those who take care of them. A phenomenon called emotional contagion or synchrony occurs when horses mirror the emotional state of their caretakers. This means that if a horse’s handler is happy, the horse is likely to be happy too and when the handler is stressed the horse is likely to respond in the same way. In simple terms, horses are tied deeply and emotionally to the people who look after them.
Mukhtar’s death by suicide in Yousafwala is a tragedy. His anguish, however, is understandable. We ignore animal feelings because we do not believe in them. Someone who takes care of a horse knows that the assumption that they are stupid, unfeeling creatures is wrong. Someone like Mukhtar would know this. It is easy to be smug and imagine that rural folk are simple-minded and animals are unfeeling. Our inclination to do so reveals more about us than it does about them.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2026
