Museum boosts conservation—by having visitors smell horse manure

We’ve all heard of the “sweet smell of success”; but, for the cultural heritage efforts of a museum in Japan, success has a quite different odor—that of horse manure.

Researchers with the Nagoya University Museum have been employing this surprising scent to foster a genuine connection between its visitors and the critically endangered Kiso horse.

According to the team, museum visitors are often able to appreciate the historical significance of a display object, but also feel little personal engagement with it.

In the case of the Kiso horse, for example, visitor surveys revealed that the public recognized the horse as a valuable cultural resource, but tended to regard it as part of an “extraordinary” world that was separate from their everyday lives.

To combat this, researchers developed an educational framework dubbed the “Sense-Science-Significance” (S-S-S) model, which uses direct sensory experiences—e.g. the smell of horse manure—to make heritage personally relevant.

“We want visitors to feel that heritage belongs to their world, not just to an exhibition case,” said professor Ayako Umemura of Nagoya University in a statement.

The Kiso horse is one of Japan’s eight surviving native horse breeds, hailing from the mountain range of the same name in the central Gifu and Nagano prefectures of Honshu, the largest of Japan’s main islands.

With an average height of around 4.3 feet, Kiso horses are small, yet nevertheless sure-footed animals. They were historically used as pack animals by farmers, and also for warfare until the sixteenth century.

Today, the Kiso is critically endangered, as are Japan’s other seven indigenous horse breeds.

This situation arose as a result of the breeding programme of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Meiji era, which spanned from 1868–1912.

Seeking taller horses for military use, it was mandated that all Kiso stallions should be castrated, and the mares of the breed bred with larger stallions imported from overseas.

From some 6,823 individuals in 1899, by the end of the Second World War, only a few pure-bred Kiso horses remained. Luckily, a single stallion dedicated to a religious shrine had managed to escape castration.

His sole offspring—named Daisan-Haruyama—was born in 1951, and went on to become the foundation stallion of the present-day breed, siring some 700 foals. Today, the population exists at only around 140 individuals.

Daisan-Haruyama’s skeleton can also be seen on display in the Nagoya University Museum, having died in 1975.

In fact, it was a special exhibition held at the museum from 2022–2023 that focused around the Dai-san Haruyama specimen that led to the creation of the S-S-S model.

Analysis of 88 visitor survey responses highlighted the disconnect between guests’ recognition of the Kiso horse as culturally important and their actual lives—or a sense of personal responsibility towards related conservation efforts.

Armed with this knowledge, the team devised a second, more deliberately structured exhibition of the remains, which was held at the Kiso Town Cultural Exchange Center.

Regular object displays and exhibit texts were accompanied by a feast for the senses.

Alongside allowing the smelling of horse manure at two different stages of fermentation—thereby making olfactible the realities of horse husbandry—visitors were able to listen to archival recordings of a traditional Kiso horse market and to handle and compare models of the hooves of a Kiso horse and a Thoroughbred.

For example, one visitor remarked that the Kiso horse’s hoof felt “plump and endearing,” an observation that facilitated a larger conversation about how the breed’s compact size made it so ideal for mountain terrain.

Each sensory experience was paired with scientific context, with the intention of promoting “comparative and analytical thinking” about the horse’s biology, ecology and history.

A survey of 75 visitors indicated that the S-S-S approach worked; respondents reported reflecting on aspects of horse management that they had not previously contemplated.

Furthermore, when asked what they would like to convey to others about the Kiso horse, 72 percent of subjects were able to provide concrete, expressive answers.

Since the revised Dai-san Haruyama exhibition, the S-S-S model has been applied to more than 30 education events at the Nagoya University Museum.

These have included those focused on other physical specimens to those highlighting broader environmental challenges.

The team hope that the S-S-S model might go on to be employed by museums around the world to increase engagement with conservation and cultural heritage.

“The framework is not intended as a prescriptive solution, but as a flexible guide that educators can adapt to their own context,” Umemura said.

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Reference

Umemura, A., & Takasu, M. (2026). Sense–Science–Significance Model: A Museum Education Framework for Engaging Visitors with Cultural Heritage. Journal of Museum Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2026.2619268