Horses

[Apollo]

I don't know. Weight. Gravity. Pain incurred due to carrying someone.  These are quite empirical factors to assume that default for all animals is quite possibly not carrying weight and hang out on your own.

A 1200lb horse is a phenomenally strong beast. They are perfectly capable of either dislodging an unwanted rider or simply refusing to move.

As for your ‘default’:



Boru

I think I already covered parent carrying offspring—it’s not the same relationship.

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If the horse doesn't want to - it's not going to.

But the thing is, you "break" a horse so that is no longer a factor. At first, they are like that. But after so many strokes of the whip, they comply.

My family raised horses growing up, so (maybe) I have some insights here. Maybe not though.

At one level, working horses is an exploitative enterprise. No doubt about that.

But at another level, horses actually like to be ridden. And they even like to pull. So it's not like every time you make a horse pull a wagon or ride down a trail that you are abusing them. They enjoy themselves more than appearances suggest. 

But still (as I said before) the relationship is fundamentally exploitative. So there's that.

Right. You don’t just go out in the wild and ride any horse—you break them first—which really conditioning their behavior according to our own will.

I have never seen any horse getting “broken “ but I am guessing they probably don’t look too pleased first time around.