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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
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
Standard. This place is turning into Reddit faster than a head of state can gas his own office.
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.
We bred them to be amenable to it and we teach them to do it from the time they are babies.
Why do the proletariat allow the bourgeoisie to ride on their backs?
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.
Cows didn't let us ride them, and look what we did to them... Look what we did to them!!!
Yummy milkers
Because riding on their fronts is too intimate.
Real men fear no intimacy.
... Try riding a horse bareback, without a saddle.
It'll give you new meaning to the terms 'ball-buster' and well, 'bareback'.
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.
That neck. Wow.
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.
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.
They don't, they've been domesticated and trained to allow it.
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. 😁
There's the serious answers here, but it makes you think. What weight am I carrying that I could just toss off my back and run free?
A 3yo child
I wish.
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.
My guess would be evolution. Those horses that let us ride them were fed well and cared for by humans and then mated with similar horses to make more and more of the same. Those that didn't let us ride them had to fight for their own food and fight for their own mates and didn't multiply as much. So we essentially happened upon a couple of horses that enjoyed hauling us around, told them to kiss each other, and we got more. Repeat and rinse for tens of thousands of year.
the horse contains the spirit of the rider's dead mom obviously
She maintains the desire to be ridden, even in the afterlife.
We have food