Tons of comments, but no answer from an actual horse.
As a horse on the interwebs, I would have replied, but everyone would just call me a neigh-sayer
I thought that only spiders were on the interwebs?
Nah, it’s horses, we just wear spider costumes online
Sleipnir, is that you?
Oh. That explains all those horse-sided spiders I’ve been seeing. Thank you.
Standard. This place is turning into Reddit faster than a head of state can gas his own office.
Way to be a neigh-sayer =P
They usually don’t and have to be “broken in”.
For those few that do so naturally, it’s more of a proto-symbiotic relationship where the rider helps provide food and safety, so they’re kept around as a pet or dumb kid.
Also, if a predator wants to bite you, having something on your back to throw at them as a distraction can be pretty damn helpful.Breaking in is just what we call the process of fostering trust and getting the horse slowly used to a rider.
The default setting in a horse’s mind is to not allow anything on its back. They will bite and kick you if you try. However, there is a clever way to change that setting, as ancient humans had discovered.
Horses are different from many other animals, such as zebras. Horses are clearly more malleable. That default setting can be changed if you’re skilled and patient enough. With zebras though, the setting to bite and kick is pretty much hard coded.
Some animals, such as camels and llamas can also be tamed and even ridden, but they will always know their position in the tier list of life i.e. way above all humans. They will tolerate humans up to a certain point, but once their patience runs out, the unfortunate human in their immediate vicinity will feel it in their skin. These animals are a bit like cats, but 10x more dangerous.
That explains why my Red Dead horses always buck me off. To give their carnivorous friends a treat while they gallop away. Sonofabitch Rockstar, you did it again
Way to self report that you’re a bad digital horse caretaker, lol.
Look, they bothered to actually model horse testicular shrinkage in very cold weather.
They have a set of systems designed to gauge how much your horse trusts you, and how well you treat it, whether or not you ride it into having a heart attack or not.
… They honestly did a shockingly good job of portraying at least some of the idiosyncracies of what its like to actually train and ride a horse.
Kinda analagous to how only a few milsim/tac shooters actually get close to portraying a bunch of the idiosyncracies that the vast majority of shooter games don’t bother with, but are actually pretty important when using an actual gun.
A thing that often gets left out of video game depictions of horses: they are actually kinda stupid and will do dumb shit fairly often, if not well trained and ridden by a skilled rider.
(And even then, they’ll still occasionally do nonsensically dumb things)
Like uh, one thing they could have easily done in RDR2, to be more realistic, but chose not to because it would likely be too annoying to most players:
You should pretty much never, ever, ride a horse along the inside of a railroad track, with all the alternating ties.
You should absolutely never get a horse up to a canter or gallop in the middle of a railroad track.
Not primarily because an unexpected train could cause them to freak out and do something stupid.
But because they are basically guaranteed to trip on the railroad ties, and eventually either stumble, crumple, throw you off, or break their own legs.
Horses will run full speed into a fucking tree and basically kill themselves (and potentially the rider as well), if you command them to and they trust you, or, if they are just sufficiently spooked.
They’ll have weird little quirks like ‘fuck you, i am not going to step in this specific puddle’, for no apparent reason.
The people I used to know who regularly did foxhunts, they would have their horses fairly often try to duck under a low branch… entirely not considering that they have a human on their back, who would then be clothes-lined by that branch.
Shit like that.
Having some dumb horse decision lead to nearly or actually getting thrown from a horse was… more or less, kinda like the way motorcycle guys talk about laying down their bike: It’s basically an inevitability that it’ll happen to you at some point, so you train for how to deal with it when it happens.
But anyway lol, yeah the horse rearing up on its hind legs is an instictual reaction to a predator in front of them.
They probably aren’t actually smart enough to work through the logic of ‘i just have to faster than the human, not the wolves or the bear’. They’re probably just terrified, and the override kicks in in their brain, and it says ‘rear up and trample the bad things’.
That that throws off the human rider probably actually does not occur to them.
Because riding on their fronts is too intimate.
… Try riding a horse bareback, without a saddle.
It’ll give you new meaning to the terms ‘ball-buster’ and well, ‘bareback’.
Real men fear no intimacy.
👏👏👏
Because we spent generations training and breeding them to allow us.
and we then train the domesticated horses from a young age that letting us ride on them is something they WANT to do, because they get snacks and scritches and they get to go outside more.
they are domesticated. if you were trying to ride a zebra they will likely attack you instead, because they are still wild and havnt been domesticated. feral horses might be also aggressive, and any “horses” that descended from ancient lineage of domesticated horses.
also zebras have a long history with african predators, so they are much more prone to aggression.
Why do the proletariat allow the bourgeoisie to ride on their backs?
It is called breaking them.
The traditional methods is to dominate the horse into accepting the various ropes and controls as well as a rider.
There are more modern approaches which focus on making the horse trust it all.
TL;DR: Submission by cringe
How did you find a video of me with my cat??
Cat lives to tower over horses lmao
Awww I loved that! The horse was weirded out but mostly ok. His body language was calm and he followed her when she walked away, which is a sign it respects you and sees you as someone to trust and follow
The horse was weirded out but mostly ok.
I mean, the whole idea is to teach the horse that these weird happenings won’t hurt it and are no cause for suicide by running away chaotically.
They get trained. Think about humans for example. There’s lots of stuff we don’t think twice about doing that aren’t necessarily things we would naturally do; they’re taught to us socially and we get used to them as part of life. Horses were domesticated, firstly selectively bred to be friendlier to humans and faster, but secondly they still get trained to form a bond with humans and to do what humans want them to do. They get used to being ridden.
Because when they tried to ride humans they would break them.
I’m pulling this from some random place in my head but horses have a strict hierarchy. There’s a head horse that runs first and people became the head horse. This is in stark contrast to zebras that don’t give a shit and cause chaos.
The random place in your head is likely a CGP Grey video about animal domestication. 😁
I first heard about this reading “guns germs and steel” around 2006 so I’ma guess that’s the origin or at least a waypoint for that thought
zebras are wild animals, even tamed they are pretty wild, and are prone to aggressive sitituations, because they have evolved with the predators in africa, so they are much more aggressive compared to other equines.
We bred them to be amenable to it and we teach them to do it from the time they are babies.
I wish horses had the gene dogs have that makes them good boys that love people
Horses are just bigger, dumber dogs.
Bigger yes, dumber no. It’s like saying dogs are dumber than cats. They’re just different and “smart” at different things. I don’t see packs of tracking cats going out on search and rescue missions
Yeah, because cats are too smart for that shit.
… You also don’t see horses doing that, without being under the direct control of human riders.
Whereas search dogs are trained to actually go looking and sniffing and finding and alerting and then returning/retreiving if no one has come to them in a sufficient amount of time…
… all on their own.
Most dog breeds are significantly more intelligent than most horse breeds.
Also random fun fact: Did you know that as part of our domestication of dogs, we essentially caused them to evolve eyebrow muscles that can convey human like facial expressions?
Wolves don’t have that. Domesticated dogs do.
Because it makes communication and bonding between both humans and dogs just work better.
Cats are scientifically less intelligent than dogs. They are not as capable of higher level reasoning.
that’s both true and completely hilariously incorrect: There is no one “intelligence”, there are effectively infinitely many different kinds of intelligence, but broadly you can break it up into stuff like “emotional intelligence”, “spatial reasoning”, “problem solving”, etc etc.
also it’s not fair to say that cats are less intelligent when no one bothers to train them, the few cats that actually get trained as much as dogs seem to be comparably good at doing quite complex things.
Big, scaredy cats
This. The other comments have been watching too many cowboy movies.
Usually we teach them from the time they are 3 years old. So basically when they are teens
Cows didn’t let us ride them, and look what we did to them… Look what we did to them!!!
Yummy milkers
I used to watch this video two years ago, and a few other horse history video on that channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMHqp0M0T4Q
It’s a more approachable video for general audience so it may not be super scientific. But they included the source/papers in the description from proper academics.
Wild horses were originally not fit for riding. It is found that their bones would not be able to support to be ridden. But at the time, horses also started interacting with human & being domesticated as food & material sources.
But human do realize the power horses have. Human started developing chariots to be pulled by horses. The chariot technology spread around the north eurasian steppe to south in the south-west asia & egypt. But I cannot definitively say if the chariot techbology in egypt or persia came from north or it’s developed locally. I haven’t exactly find out about the relationship of both region when it comes to chariot technology.
During few thousand years later horses also slowly evolved physicaly to be able to be ridden. And so in later bronze age, nomadic steppe people emerges such as the Saka/Scythians, Xiongnu, etc.
My personal searching two years ago was definitely very focused on central asia/eurasian steppe region. So I cannot say much about the same stuff happening in south-west asia despite I know there are a lot going on in that area at the same time. But then after writing this and re-read the question, this doesn’t exactly answer why horses allow human to ride them 🤣🤣 I only say about how human changed horse.
Horse evolution is an overlooked aspect that we ignore often. Think of them like dogs: today, there are several different breeds of varying sizes, some burlier, some sleeker. In the early stages of domestication, this variety wasn’t there, but with time and lots of selective (cross)breeding, we got to where we are today.
Belgian Drafts tend to be big, and this one was the absolute unit
That glorious equine appears to be about average sized for a Clydesdale. Never heard of the Belgian Draft breed before.
Yeah… there’s a difference between the kind of horse you bred to work in a team and pull a cart or carriage or train of them…
… and the kind of horse that’s a one rider endurance runner vs sprinter…
… and the kind of horse that you would gird with steel armor and sit a steel armored man on them, and then charge them directly into melee combat as heavy shock cavalry.
That neck. Wow.
It’s a work of fiction, but I highly recommend Last of the Amazons by Stephen Pressfield. He does fantastic, heavily researched historical fictions with an abundance of resources at the end to reaearch the history he bases his plots off of.
It’s basically about Eurasian tribes who had horses central to their religious mythos and how they dealt with the Greeks. It’s fantastic.
Thank you for the recommendation! That does sound familiar. The Scythian is the people the Greeks called to what Persian people call Saka.
Why do humans allow cats to ride in their arms?
Toxoplasmosis
Best. Parasite. Ever.
Because that fucker are not allowed on the kitchen bench
Because I’ve trained all of my cats to accept me carrying them around the house…
Oh fuck. They trained ME to be a cat taxi!
The same reasons dogs work for us. They are domesticated animals, selective breeding for thousands of years. Then training, teach them when they are young to do complex tasks. They then enjoy the tasks because it makes us happy. Think of sled dogs, or seeing eye dogs. Not exactly a natural thing for them, but once they are trained they really enjoy it.
