Horse Blood, Fertility Drugs, and Me (Part 1)
A First-Hand Account of Violence in Iceland
Icelandic people are the direct descendants of Vikings, but that doesn’t mean they rape and pillage. They’re actually very open-minded people, much as you would expect from many European countries. However, they are islanders, so some weird stuff goes down without the neighbors oversea noticing.
Note that not all Icelandic people participate in what I’m about to share. In fact, most do not. But, some farmers know about the practice and even fewer actually act on it.
After leaving a particularly disturbing work trade arrangement at a hostel/restaurant with grotesquely low standards of cleanliness, my partner, Derek, and I arrived via five sweaty hours of intermittent hitchhiking at the home of our next host. It was a little house with a detached garage, chicken coop, and large, neglected garden where we would pull weeds. The quaint home was nestled cozily between the berm-obscured coast and the only maximum-security prison on the island.
The heavyset, blonde woman who was our host thrust out her arms and smothered us in hugs, immediately welcoming us into the family while we tripped over a mountain of shoes in the entryway.
We squeezed our bodies and backpacks into the cramped kitchen to sit down at the table, which was covered in crumbs and wood shavings. Our new host (let’s call her Agatha*) explained that all the other WorkAwayers (that’s what the work trade folks are referred to with the program we use) were out for their day off. Before that we didn’t know that there would be other WorkAwayers, so we asked how many more there were.
There were four others with one more due to arrive the next day. For a total of seven. Seven strange adults living in the family home with three teenage boys and one bathroom.
We tried to overlook this little detail and revel in the positives…overbearing hugs are good, right?
Two days later, on a crisp, blue Sunday we drove to a farm near the town of Hvolsvöllur. Rather than gardening, our task was to help our host’s son herd horses.
“I don’t know anything about horses,” I confessed to one of the girls who had done this work the week before.
“The first part is easy, you just stand there and hold out your arms. The horses pretty much know where to go,” she explained. But I was left wondering what more there was to it after the “first part.”
Agatha left each WorkAwayer armed with a stick on the side of the road with the instruction, “Don’t let the horses pass you.”
She sent me and Derek to the bend in the road that led back to town with the same instruction. Neither of us knowing anything about horses, we were nervous.
“We don’t know what we’re supposed to do exactly,” I confessed to Agatha.
“Just scream at them if they come toward you,” she screeched, “It’s easy. An idiot could do it.”
Moments later, the two of us stood our ground as a herd of nearly 100 horses stampeded toward us. We waved our sticks in the air and screamed. Miraculously, the horses turned the way they were meant to, which was a relief. Icelandic horses are tiny compared to most other breeds but are still big in terms of animals charging toward you.
We then followed the horses in the car that Agatha drove behind the herd. She honked incessantly and cursed at the running animals to move faster. We could see the wild whites of their eyes as they tossed their heads around in annoyance. When Agatha spotted that no one was blocking the last bit of road by the field entrance where the horses were meant to go, she slammed on the gas quite unexpectedly.
She smashed the brakes just as abruptly and ordered that we get out of the car. She pointed at the places for us to stand to guide the horses into the pen. Once again, they were coming straight toward us. And again, they avoided us completely and funneled neatly into the field.
When the last mare and her foal ran into the pen, we closed the fence, locking ourselves in with the animals.
They were roaming around, casually eating grass and nursing their young. Derek and I pulled out our phones to document the peaceful animals, fully enjoying their picturesque beauty with the volcano Eyjafjallajokull visible in the distance.
The peace ended with a shriek from Agatha, “Push them into the pen!” We quickly slipped our phones away and started running across the field with the other WorkAwayers. The horses were spread out, so they didn’t behave with the same group mentality that they displayed on the road. They were frightened by the people running with sticks, particularly scared of the deranged blonde whose screams neared frequencies that only dogs can hear.
A brown mare panicked and turned to get away from Agatha, but was heading straight toward me. I waved my arms and tried to look big (I’m 5’2”) while I shouted, “Please turn around!”
To my surprise, she did. Within a few feet of me, she spun around and ran back toward the others to join the growing crowd of horses. I was shocked that I alone had managed to frighten her.
The humans then formed a wall across the narrow part of the field, and we moved as one to push the horses into an empty pen. Somehow the single stallion, 52 mares, and their foals squeezed their bodies inside as the farmer closed the gate.
“Isn’t that pen too small for all of them?” I asked. No one bothered to answer. That was the first of many questions to be ignored.
I followed the others to the opposite side of the pen where there was an adjoining pen that led to two narrow chutes, each ending in a horse-sized, cage-esque enclosure. Scattered all over the ground were two by fours, many of which were cracked and splintered.
“What are these for?” Derek asked, picking up one of the boards.
“Those are to separate the horses from each other when they go in the chute,” one of the WorkAwayers explained as he demonstrated sliding the board between the bars.
“Why are they broken?” I asked.
“Because the horses resist. They are basically wild, so they don’t like being in the chute,” someone said. “Just be careful how you hold the boards so you don’t get kicked.”
Wild? I walked closer to the pen that was radiating the heat of equine bodies. For the first time, I noticed that stamped onto the backs of the adult horses was a number, an ID. That’s when I realized that these horses weren’t like the ones in the USA. These horses were not beloved pets.
I glanced over at Derek. He was squatting beside one of the horse-sized enclosures with a look of concern on his face.
“What is that?” I nodded toward the numerous rusty brown spots on the metal bars he was inspecting.
“I think it’s blood,” he whispered, indicating similar spots all over the broken boards and in the dirt. He looked up at me, his brown eyes brimming with worry, “What are we doing to these horses?”
Continued in Part 2
*Names changed
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