Hard riding no saddles or stirrups

[Caius Fabius]

Armchair cavalry commanders?

Horses will not this and horses will not do that.... !!!!!!!!

I will agree that horses will not fly (without help).
Most everything else that people keep saying that horses will not do is simply a matter of conditioning and training. If you want to spend your life training horses, you can teach them to obey and 1. charge other horses, 2. charge formed infantry, 3. dance, 4. lay down, roll over, and jump into a pool of water from a diving board, 5. stand next to a firing cannon, 6. move into a yelling mob of people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, 7. kick people in the face..... the list is limited by your imagination and ability and amount of time you want to spend. (They don't use tools very well, but they can be trained to open a door, a drawer, a barrel of feed or a gate).

Is an untrained horse going to do all of this, no, (although they like to roll over on their own and stallions will attack each other without human help.)

I get the impression that there are some really well read people here, who have not ridden even a bare 100 miles on a horse, but are quoting their reading as 'absolute known truth'. Unfortunately, then other people see these well-written 'facts' and actually believe them. I may not be able to prove what color of tunic someone wore in ancient Roman army, but if you want to pay for my time and the horse and upkeep, I can darn well prove that you can teach a horse to attack formed infantry, (you better pay their insurance), and will charge into another horse. It will take a lot of time, 2 or 3 years to get the horse working to standards, and it will take about 4-6 hours a day of my time, but then, what else were Roman cavalrymen doing? And I will have to ride bareback with just a saddle pad, until I get a 4 horned saddle that fits.

It doesn't matter if I train the horse to run at the enemy, letting me throw several missile weapons, and then slash with my long sword (spatha) or if we use a kontos, ie long spear, which we break or get rid of at first contact and then use another weapon.

I can't imagine any historian who studies the weapons and history of Alexander saying that no one could couch a lance without stirrups. You just let go instead of holding on at contact!

To imagine that in 1000 years of history, that Roman cavalry was only used in one way is another fallacy! We know that in the Republic, lightly armed cavalrymen rode into battle and dismounted for combat, remounting and riding forward or backwards; while in the late empire, the massed heavy cavalry was capable of making a frontal charge against infantry formations. I suspect that training the horse to stay at your side in the middle of a battle while you dismounted was harder than training it to be a part of a mass charge against infantry. Training a cow pony (horse) to stop and stand still when you dismount to dally up the calf you have roped, then to apply backward strain on the lariat to control the calf is much harder than teaching the horse to haze a bull or cow.

Some of this stuff can't be learned by reading books or the internet, or even sitting around a campfire, you actually have to get out and do it, or you probably should not be making pronouncements about what you can and can't teach an animal to do. One of these days I'll probably end up dead because I didn't train or know an animal as well as I thought I did, but that does not mean the animal is untrainable, just that I wasn't doing it right!