It is somewhat a cliché to say that we do not understand ourselves as humans until we have mirrored ourselves in the eyes of an animal. But as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, this mirroring is never a perfect reflection, but a play with mirrors through which different kinds of humanity are conjured up depending on the positioning of the mirrors. In this talk I will discuss this mirroring act through the example of interspecies relationships in riding schools. The figure of the centaur is often used to describe riding: the upper half of the centaur is a rational and reflexive human, leading the lower, equine half of pure muscle. However, pupils’ accounts and observations of riding lessons turn the figure of the centaur upside down—the riders come to understand horses as human-like, minded beings, while they simultaneously recognize animal aspects of their own being. In the lecture I will show how this mirroring act comes about and discuss its implications for human-animal studies. To fully understand this trick with mirrors, we need to look not only at what humans do, but also at how nonhuman animals manipulate the hall of mirrors with their actions, their resistance, and sometimes by their mere presence.