The Horse Helped Shape Our World at Great Expense to Itself
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Going back to Xenophon (and Simeon before him), who wrote one of the earliest surviving treatises on horsemanship, the personal qualities it takes to ride and train were also the basis for leadership. Xenophon's work on the Cavalry General is mainly practical and tactical, but expands on some of the principles of horsemanship - a key one being, "nothing forced can be beautiful."
The essence of it is that because they are prey animals, good horsemanship is necessarily an exercise in leadership.
Dom Duarte's 13th century treatise (next on my list) is also about the moral qualities for horsemanship, and the classic "education of the king," by Pluvinel is about educating the king of France as a horseman, with an eye to developing the king as a leader.
IMHO, officer training has always included horsemanship because it develops a kind of physical presence and fearlessness required to get people to follow them willingly.
Glad to see something like this mentioned on HN, as revisiting the cultivation of leadership through physical and moral exercise is something we in tech could certainly benefit from.
That's something I hadn't thought of directly, but it's very true.
My wife is a horse trainer & riding instructor and one of the first things I see her teaching is being decisive and clear about what you want the animal to do. The parents of her younger students (mostly girls) often report that their kids become much more confident after taking lessons.
Horses are very finely attuned to body language and don't respond very well to someone who is timid and uncertain. The flip side of that is, of course, if (s)he really doesn't want to do something, come hell or high water, it ain't happening!
I don't understand how you're making the jump from "leading a horse is like leading a team" (which is easy to agree with) to some point about morality.
The qualities of good horsemanship are essentially moral and physically cultivated qualities, and among those is the ability to be recognized as a leader and followed willingly by another creature in nature.
I am saying the qualities that people recognize as leadership and follow willingly, are moral qualities that can be developed and taught, and there is a history of those being taught through horsemanship.
Patience: it's an animal, it doesn't care what you want, but with work and education, you both transform.
Perseverance: incremental work, with a living being that isn't subject to reasoning, is what makes the most change.
Ownership and Obligation: the animal is your responsibility, it does not have responsibility, you own your failures.
Decisiveness: related to ownership.
Benevolence: xenophon's "nothing forced is beautiful," and (I think la Guerieniere's) "ask much, be content with little, reward often." exemplify these.
Takt: the ability to express your intent simply, unambiguously, consistently, and with a stable emotional presence.
Temperence, moderation, and sympathy: this is a living thing you can't just threaten into submission.
Magnanimity: the animal is going to test you constantly, and you have to be greater than it.
There are other aspects that the words we use today have been freighted with inaccurate critical interpretations, but they are similar to the Aristotelian virtues.
These (among many) in addition to exercising the physical experience of leading, which means to be followed willingly. You learn how you don't just read about something and become it.
Maybe the agricultural revolution was too powerful...
I love the animals. They're like big dogs that don't understand how truly massive they are.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/789444/War-Horse-M...
I wonder how many cars get totalled in NY per day
I'm not sure I buy the whole peacetime was hell for horses vs lower or middle class humans during these same time periods.
"Dead horses were unwieldy, and street cleaners often waited several days for the corpses to putrefy so they could more easily be sawed into pieces."
It's worth remembering that horses dying of trauma on the street was much less common before widespread automobile adoption. A horse that died on the street in 1900 probably had a number of health issues that would have made consumption more risky. Also it probably had no meat left to speak of. One would have had to just boil everything, to have anything to eat.
Ah, you must live in one of those... whaddyacallem... cities.~
Roadkill is very often eaten by something, though if a human wants to do it, they have to pick it up before the county gets to it. After that, it's literally off the table. The exact method of disposal depends on jurisdiction, but some places have a sanctuary or research facility for carnivorous species nearby.
A random dead deer in NW Indiana, for instance, might get picked up by Wolf Park research facility, stored in their freezer, and fed to the main pack (still frozen).
Dead horses were picked up by knackers and turned into dodgy sausages all the time. This was just one of the unsafe food practices that led to the establishment of the FDA and public health inspectors.
However, since I'm human, I assumed the preposition "we" did not apply in this case.
And, FWIW, I live on a farm.
If anyone wants to ride in on their high horse, I'd eat that too. Nobody does it who can afford not to.
Or nutters like Gary Busey.
Horses I presume were used but I'm thinking they were much more expensive and less multi-purpose than oxen?
I mean one can also point out a period where civilization was between a pre-oxen standard and that of post-oxen. I understand the part horses play in war but agriculture tends to affect more in history generally speaking.
I'd be curious to hear about distinct advantages to plow horses. They must exist, otherwise no one would plow with horses.
Horses were previously used mainly for military and business transportation via carriage and carts, but this change made them economical for farmers and ploughmen.
Thing is, the temperament and intelligence of horses were different, and the non-military horseman as a profession was born. That was the origin of a lot of the so-called "gypsy," mysticism about "whispering," as there were tricks of the trade that ploughmen used to protect their business.
The history is fascinating, and not unlike the way crypto is today. Where a former exclusively military technology proliferated to a trade class, who organized to "professionalize," it to preserve the integrity and value of its secrets.
They formed something called "the society of the horseman's word," which was a pseudo-masonic group modeled after what Millers had done in their own trade. There is a bunch of hocus pocus around their history, but viewed as a trade association or guild, it makes economic sense.
--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar
I guess your history of ploughman culture is mistaken.
This excerpt may have been the design change that was referenced.
"There was little attempt to change the design of the plough until the mid 1600's with the Dutch being among the first in improving its shape. This change in shape was soon discovered in Northern England and Scotland with Joseph Foljambe from Rotherham building and patented a plough having what was described as, the perfect implement then in use."
"http://www.ploughmen.co.uk/about-us/history-of-the-plough"
Perhaps there is a more direct way to discredit the implications of my original post?
And in America of course we credit John Deere for reinventing the moldboard plow in the early 1800's. Sadly we weren't taught of any English innovations in school.
Horse is an animal. I find it highly disturbing to compare their 'loses' to actual humans.
Humans are an animals too, the most numerous in fact. We should show some empathy and understanding in regards to all life. Not separate and somehow feel indifferent about anything "non-animal".
This is exactly what i am talking about. Highly disturbing.
That sounds like it makes a lot of perfectly ordinary conversations difficult.
Like most biases, this sacredness phenomenon is not all bad; it's an important heuristic allowing us, as it allowed cavepeople, to make complex moral judgments at a moment's notice. But in the modern world, constantly faced with the need to make evolutionarily-strange types of judgments, it's important that we recognize this feeling as what it is: a tool for instantly making reasonably-accurate decisions.
Comparing the scale of horse deaths to the scale of human deaths isn't an attack on the value of human life; if the author had to save a human or a horse in a snap decision, I'm sure they'd save the human without thinking. They are not a sociopath with a broken sense of sacredness, they're someone who has learned to do an unnatural thing: put aside their gut instinct and speak rationally about these important issues.
What a Western-centric view.
Entire human civilizations developed for centuries or millennia, without horses -- they really don't conform to the phases of "pre-horse, horse and post-horse" because they were never "horse".
It's possible (although ill-conceived and wrong) to argue that there is no history and no culture outside of Western civilization; but then one should make an argument about it, not simply ignoring immense parts of the human adventure.
I said no such thing.
I said that a great number of civilization and cultures, that lasted for many centuries, developed without ever using horses, and that therefore, the horse cannot be considered to define all of human civilization.
For a non-Western chunk of data, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_East_Asian_warfare
The quote wasn't that "no civilization existed without horses", it was that the horse was "decisive in shaping human history".
When you consider what happened to advanced civilizations like the Aztec and Inca when they interfaced with horseborne civilizations, the point makes sense, and isn't doing so by marginalizing people who didn't have horses.
If I am misrepresenting your political philosophy, then you should say specifically what it is.