To ride or not to ride? That is the question.

Within the horsemanship world, there tends to be two extreme positions, one which champions horseback riding, and another which denounces it as cruel. Is it ethical or not to ride horses? Can we learn how horses themselves feel about being ridden?

To start this post off, it’s important to note that I am not seeking to sway anyone’s opinion, as I myself currently stand in the middle ground on this discussion. I care for three horses of my own who have carried me on their backs at one time or another, but do not have to “earn their keep” by performing this task. While I have always enjoyed riding horses, I have learned ways of being with them early on in life that allowed me to raise the question: do horses enjoy being ridden as much as we enjoy riding them?

Disclaimer: the thoughts presented here may be triggering for some people. If you find yourself becoming triggered or emotional about these arguments, breathe, and understand you don’t have to agree with anything or everything presented here. You are a unique individual with unique experiences of the world, and your perspective may guide you in an incredibly different direction from the path that those around you follow. Your priority should be to find that path where you feel balanced. Therein lies the beauty of free will - you may believe in or express yourself in any way you want, and it may be accepted or even applauded so long as it doesn’t cause harm to yourself or others.

Now with that said, we have conveniently arrived at the first point of this post: we as humans highly value an individual’s right to free will (again so long as it isn’t harmful to the individual or others), but do we compromise the horse’s free will in order to ride them?

Free Will

For just a moment, imagine that a friend of yours decides to fasten the hide of a dead animal onto your back. You may start to become panicked, and while your friend tries to reassure and calm you, they proceed to climb on top of you to straddle the dead animal hide which is now securely stuck onto your back. Perhaps you flip out and cause them to fall off of your back, and then your friend in turn starts to chase you into a frenzy until you drip with sweat or ties you to a post in the warm sun while they wait for you to be worn down for a second attempt at climbing onto your back again. Consider that while you may quickly grow tired and less able to protest, you are still full of fear and pumped with adrenaline in response to not being able to shake this dead animal strapped onto your back, and unable to voice your disapproval at being mounted without being reprimanded. If you have no trouble imagining this, then you know well what a horse is traditionally subjected to in the process of being “broken in under saddle”.

Fear, panic, overwhelm, and shock are accompanying emotional baggage from the “breaking process” wherein horses are forced into accepting a rider. If the common phrase “breaking a horse to the saddle” itself doesn’t get across that this kind of horseback riding is cruel, then boy do we have our work cut out for us in this article. While this subject is nothing short of controversial, I hope that we can all agree that there are certainly cruel ways of riding horses which sadly still are practiced, and our aim as horsemanship practitioners should be to bring them to an end.

Suffice to say, a horse who is tied down, flooded with new stimuli until they go into shock and either shut down, or choose fight or flight as they are forced into submission under saddle has been stripped entirely of their free will. I ran into an extreme example of this when I was told by a woman who was injured from getting bucked off of her horse, that because her horse needed to be exercised, she was planning to drug her horse the next time she intended to ride them so they wouldn’t be able to buck her off. Yes, unfortunately you read that correctly - she said she was going to “drug her horse” in order to ride them. Those words played over and over in my head like a broken record, and I couldn’t comprehend how she didn’t realize how incredibly wrong that was. Horseback riding is not always so black and white, though, as even when we aren’t technically subjecting our horse to carry us through force or intimidation, there are grey areas where it’s debated whether the horse should truly be carrying us at all.

Is Cruelty In the Eye of the Beholder?

You will see this word ‘cruel’ come up frequently, but you may not interpret it in the same way I do. Why is this? While it may seem like an obvious and fixed definition, animal cruelty is very much subjective and changes depending on the perspective of the beholder. For instance, a vegan might refer to killing an animal for meat as murder, however our society which breeds animals who we call ‘livestock’ for human consumption would not convict a slaughterhouse worker of murder for killing a cow raised for meat. However, if said slaughterhouse worker unnecessarily went out of their way to cause harm to a cow they were employed to kill or ‘harvest’, they could be convicted of committing animal cruelty depending on legal statutes. Now when it comes to us referring to horses who are being ridden in a cruel fashion, we aren’t exactly saying that the authorities should be called to convict the rider of animal cruelty, especially when the rider doesn’t know they are inflicting unnecessary harm. Our goal in employing the use of ‘cruel’ in this sense is to call attention to the agency of the horse, which is to say that if the horse feels they are being harmed in the process of being ridden then employing the word ‘cruel’ is warranted. We can theorize that the cow being raised for meat would likely call humans cruel for intending to kill and consume them if they had the ability to do so. However, what would the horse say if they had the speech to voice themselves in regards to being ridden for sport, entertainment, or pleasure. As horsemanship practitioners or horse guardians, it is our responsibility to strive to understand and do right by them to the best of our abilities. Furthermore, as Ingold explains, empathizing with the perspectives and experiences of species other than our own “inevitably blurs those comfortable distinctions by which we order our lives: between domestication and slavery, hunting and homicide, and carnivory and cannibalism” (Ingold, 2016: 3).

While definitions and harm and cruelty will vary greatly between individuals, below I’ve outlined some common horseback riding practices which can border on animal cruelty:

• Drugging

• Whipping

• Spurring

• Kicking

• Hitting

• Reliance on bits

Share your thoughts and experiences on these practices in the comments below, or if you think anything is missing from this list. Note: any tool can be used as a weapon, period. Like the old adage goes, it’s not what you do, but how you do it. I don’t seek to simply write off the tool as cruel (i.e. whips, bits, spurs) but rather to acknowledge that it is how the tool is being used that gives it the power to cause harm.

Beasts of Burden

Dr. Deb Bennett’s article (2008) “Timing and Rate of Skeletal Maturation in Horses” is a revolutionary template for determining when a horse is ready, anatomically that is, to be ridden without damaging or hindering their skeletal growth. Dr. Bennett (2008: 6, 7) explains,

“Just about everybody has heard of the horse’s “growth plates”, and commonly when I ask them, people tell me that the “growth plates” are somewhere around the horse’s knees (actually the one’s people mean are located at the bottom of the radius-ulna bone just above the knee). This is what gives rise to the saying that, before riding the horse, it’s best to wait “until his knees close” (i.e., until the growth plates convert from cartilage to bone, fusing the epiphysis, or bone-end to the diaphysis or bone-shaft). What people often don’t realize is that there is a “growth plate” on either end of every bone behind the skull. And in the case of some bones (like the pelvis or vertebrae, which have many “corners”) there are multiple growth plates.

So do you then have to wait until all these growth plates convert to bone? No. But the longer you wait, the safer you’ll be. Owners and trainers need to realize there’s an easy-to-remember schedule of fusion — and then make their decision as to when to ride the horse based on that rather than on the external appearance of the horse.”

While the exact schedule for skeletal maturation will vary in individual horses, Dr. Bennett (2008) details the approximate timeframe which horse’s growth plates mature, for example the scapula (the weight bearing portion) takes between 3 to 3.5 years for full maturation, and the pelvis doesn’t stop growing until the horse is about 5 or more years old (2008: 7). Most importantly, though, the vertebral column (the spine) doesn’t fully fuse until the horse is at least 5 years old (in a small horse), and 8 years old (in a large horse such as a Thoroughbred or Draft) (2008: 8). The common age that many horses are started is between 2 and 4 years (2 years in the racing industry), and considering the greatest impact riding has is on the spine which doesn’t mature until at least 5 years old (or approximately 8 years for Thoroughbreds), we can safely conclude that starting horses at age 2 to endure serious riding (as in horse racing) is far too early and begging for injuries and long-term damage to the horse’s body. In short, starting horses too early for performance when their body isn’t matured and equipped to handle that kind of activity and weight bearing is cruel.

A Bond To Die For

The woman behind the Bite Size Vegan video series, Emily Moran Barwick, has said, “of all the sensitive topics I’ve covered from religion to abortion, my videos on horse riding ethics have by far sparked the most controversy” (Bite Size Vegan: 2016). Why is it that the ethics of horseback riding is such a sensitive topic? The answer to this question goes far beyond our modern relationships with horses. For centuries horses and humans have shared a special bond which has inspired poetry, worship, and devotion. The horse-human relationship is eloquently embodied by the Norse rune (a divinatory symbol or letter in an ancient Germanic alphabet) ‘Ehwaz’, which means horse, movement, or a bond we would die for. Needless to say, many horse-folk hold their relationships with horses as something much greater than themselves which they hold as sacred.

To truly know whether it is ethical to ride horses requires not just dissecting anatomical, physiological, and philosophical studies, but most importantly, having a conversation with horses themselves. By having a conversation, however, I don’t mean to recommend you go and start talking to your horse and expecting them to answer you back in our spoken language, but rather I mean having a conversation in the most ancient sense of the word, wherein you live among and gain familiarity or intimacy with individual horses.

Many horse-folk talk about putting the relationship with their horse first, but if that allows them to visit their horse at the barn for one hour a day and expect their horse to be happy to be ridden because they have good intentions, they are doing themselves and their horse an injustice. The point of putting the relationship first means not just showing up when it is convenient for you and expecting your horse to give you their all as if they don’t have anything better to do. It also doesn’t mean a horse should be happy getting exercised for an hour or two a day when they are migrating animals forced to adapt to living in a small paddock or stall for the other 22 to 23 hours a day (this topic will be discussed more in depth in a later post). Rather, putting the relationship with your horse first means cultivating familiarity with them to know what is in their best interest, not simply what is in yours.

“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” - A.A. Milne

So is it ethical or not to ride horses? Go find out for yourself. Rather than asking members of your own species, though, go seek answers from the horses who will give you their truth, not just our interpretation of it. Do your own research. Learn through your own experiences, trials and errors. Ask for wisdom and guidance from horses and strive to do right by them, and carry these words by Alexander Nevzerov with you, both in the saddle and on the ground astride them:

“A horse’s back is not a seat, not a place for a human butt, not a piece of “meat”, not some sort of “terra firma”. It is a very complex and tender anatomical structure with extraordinary functions. Besides the obvious biomechanical function, the back has another very important function. The spinal cord’s work is to guarantee that the response’s from the entire nervous system can communicate the senses of taste, smell, vision, and vestibular function to the brain, not to get lost in too much detail. On this especially vulnerable, sensitive organ, onto the medulla spinalis, the brain of the back, sits a rider.”

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Resources

Bennett, D., 2008. Timing and Rate of Skeletal Maturation in Horses. Available at: http://www.equinestudies.org/ranger_2008/ranger_piece_2008_pdf1.pdf. [Accessed 13 August, 2019].

Bite Size Vegan (2016) [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4GxhmqCqQA&t=44s [Accessed 20 May, 2019].

Ingold, T., 2016. What is an animal?. Routledge.

Nevzerov Haute Ecole (Horsemanship School). Information available at: http://hauteecole.ru/en/ [Accessed 12 August, 2019].

The Path of the Horse (2007) [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j0Z19IhgPA [Accessed 12 August, 2019].