Ponies At The Edge Of The World: On nature, belonging and finding home

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Munro is an anthropologist by training. She has an affinity and connection with the Shetland Isles, and a fascination with its native animals, particularly Shetland ponies. Her PhD was specifically about the relationship between the islanders who breed and maintain the integrity of the ponies, and the animals they are fostering. For her research, she spent more than a year living on one of the islands, and visiting others to spend time with the pony communities – both the people and the equines. This is an account of all that, and of intense changes, both of loss, and of personal growth, which she found. Catherine Munro is living in Aberdeen, lurching from temporary job to temporary job, the stress of not knowing if she can pay the bills gradually eroding her spirit and soul. Eventually, her application to study for a doctorate is successful and she travels to the Shetland Island to study the eponymous ponies of the archipelago.

I spend some time each year on Shetland, particularly on Foula which features as a whole chapter of this book, and Out Skerries which is often accessed via Whalsay where most of the other chapters are based. I found the observations about Shetland as a whole and specific islands to be perceptive. Any reader of the book taking to the description of Foula is recommended to visit, it really is as unique as it comes across.

I very much enjoyed this book. I was tempted by the cover and the blurb and when you read that a book has been written by a PhD student, you are pretty much assured of good writing. I wasn't disappointed. I'm not a horse person particularly, but I live close to an area where ponies roam freely so they are commonplace in the environment around me. I hoped that this book would not be exclusively based on the ponies but would be more a memoir style account of the experience living in the Shetland Isles - it is exactly that. There is an enormous sense of place, of the community that welcomed the writer and the nature and landscape around her. I loved the observations of wildlife - otters, seals and birdlife and also the story of the adopted lamb or caddy. At the Edge of the World is a 2008 documentary which chronicles the efforts of animal rights activist Paul Watson and 45 other volunteers, who set out in two Sea Shepherd ships to hinder the Japanese whaling fleet in the waters around Antarctica. The film won Best Environmental Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Director and Producer Dan Stone would later produce the first season of Whale Wars. It depicts what went on during this excursion, with clips of beautiful scenery, news clips, whaling in action, and life on the ship. On a final anthropology point Munro brings out the islands themselves as an active participant in her research. This worked amazingly well and made me think a lot about how I view place and how so often we don’t take into account one of the biggest actors in our everyday lives. I also thought she drew some very interesting theories about balancing domesticity of animals and their wildness and the dangers of too much one way or another. The importance as well of animal and human reciprocity was really well argued. It reminded me in many ways of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work.

Catherine Munro and her husband move to Shetland for a year so that she can study the Shetland ponies for a thesis she is writing. This book beautifully interweaves the information she garners about the ponies and those who care for them with her experience of adapting to island life and her own personal journey toward a place of belonging. The author is not vegan and the book ties our past to our present more than our future --so the ethical questions fall short for our modern ruination. The passage about Yoda, the lamb's future, strikes this vegan reader as violent, harsh, and sad --although the author's decision between her available choices for him makes sense. And, at least, he will be allowed some years alive. I loved her descriptions of Shetland scenery and culture - I have never been to Shetland, so I can say how accurate they are, but they left me with a strong sense of the place. I also appreciated the way in which she was willing to learn from local people, her concern to adapt to the culture and her awareness of her own ignorance - it made a refreshing change from the know-it-all attitude of some memoirs written by those who move to more remote locations! We are almost half way through the year and this has definitely been one of the stand out reads for me so far in 2022. ‘The Ponies at the Edge of the World’ is an ethnography on Shetland’s Shetland Ponies. The book explores themes of belonging, roots and community, tradition, our relationship to the land (and sea) as well as our relationship to animals and their relationship to us.Against Munro’s journey to understand the ponies is set her own desire to have a family. When tragedy hits it is the natural world and the animals that inhabit it that provide the comfort and hope she needs to move forward. Shetlanders describe the islands as being a part of them, as being in their blood, and that wherever they go in the world they will always call the islands home.”