Horses by biology are prey animals whose first reaction to anything potentially life-threatening is to run. Much of this can be mitigated by training and rider skill but there's always just a remnant of the horse's biology and even with the most extensive training, horses can and do react to stimuli. The key is to train the horse to be be able to recover from the negative stimulus. In the picture below, the horse is reacting to the explosion of a shell landing close by. Of course what we don't know is if the horse than ran away or remained in place (relatively).
From the looks of things, it appears that the rider is handling things but it can still be quite a scary experience since there's the potential that the horse could flip over, crushing the rider, or fall to the side and pinning the rider (and breaking bones). Either way, things are pretty dicey here.
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| Horse reacting to shell fire. |
Upon fruther examination, it appears that his picture might have been altered (ie Photoshopped) to add in the shell explosion. If you look on the left side, you can tell that the ground next to the picture of the explosion is different from the ground next to the horse and rider. Also, you can make out a faint line running up the picture just to the left of the rearing horse. It's pretty obvious that the upper left hand corner depicting the shell explosion was graft on to the picture of the rearing horse and rider.
ReplyDeleteWill wonders ever cease to amaze?