Thursday Video: Automated Horse Training?

Liz Hall posted this video on Facebook yesterday, and after reading the comments I had to see it for myself. This is a new contraption geared towards reducing or eliminating human interference and error by exercising horses automatically. Built like a futuristic horse-drawn carriage, this fancy machine is designed to exercise horses at the walk, trot, canter and gallop. There are even additional machines that allow for multiple horses to be exercised at once (check out the 4:00-minute marker to see this). Here are the qualms I have about this device:

1. Safety. What if a horse trips and falls or throws a tantrum? I guarantee you not all horses will be as happy to be exercised by this machine as the demo horses are in this video.

2. Money. I’m not sure I want to know how much this contraption costs. My guess is that Sheikh Mohammed would be the only one who could afford it. Or perhaps Oprah Winfrey, if she was into that sort of thing.

3. “The feel.” A huge part of training a horse is the education of the horse to accept the aids. This machine does nothing to train the horse to respond to human contact.

I could add many more things to this list, but I’ll stop there. At the end of the day, my vote stays with human riders. What do you think?

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