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Comment by asimpletune | Hacker News Reader

One detail that I think is so cool is how people from this period rode horses without a saddle. I think it leads to very different capabilities as well as different horses than we have now. The riders have to scoot much further up, almost on the neck of the horse.

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Growing up my farm-raised mom got the horsey bug for a bit and altho we only had a half acre and couldn't keep horses ourselves we rented a horse from a family in our church. An uncooperative moody unfriendly half-arabian half-something else mean jerk that we could only ride bareback for some reason. And so that's how I rode it all around. I guess I didn't know any better, but I got used to it.

Until the day it decided it had enough, bucked me off and turned and kicked me in the face (luckily it had no horseshoes). Then I made it clear that I was done with horses and 'Diablo' went home (where he never wanted to leave in the first place) and I never had to see him again.

Hope you enjoyed my pointless tangent.

How much damage did the kick in the face do?

A little bruising, no concussion. Parents took me to the hospital and had me looked over. He had no horseshoes and must have just grazed me.

The horse was just correcting you then (in its mind obviously). I've seen a horse correct a dog before with a kick and the dog was like whoah that sucked won't do that again. I've also heard stories of dogs harassing horses to the point where the horse is really pissed off, gives them the full double barrel, and at that point the only humane option is euthanizing the poor dog.

One of the newer John Wick movies showed what a pissed off horse can do in memorable style.

> One of the newer John Wick movies showed what a pissed off horse can do in memorable style.

Yep, that's quite a smack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5l3ncEcRKs

Love how all the horses are just standing around non-chalant while gunshots go off all over. Very realistic :-)

Either the sound was added later or those were exceptionally well trained animals. Probably both.

My brother did civil war reenactment and there was a lot of black powder exploding and they managed to train the horses to tolerate it. But it definitely took training!

All of it is added in post, they'd all be deaf after filming the first scene otherwise

That was a great tangent. Were you able to ride him at a gallop like that? How did you hold on? Were you seated closer to the neck or directly over the back?

I was 11 or 12, I don't remember much :-) Definitely could get him going at a reasonable pace. But I dunno. I'm sure there are horsey type people here who can talk about bareback riding, or youtube would help (tho ... other ... content might come up). I recall being taught to ride this way, but I also recall it had disadvantages.

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