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they are domesticated. if you were trying to ride a zebra they will likely attack you instead, because they are still wild and havnt been domesticated. feral horses might be also aggressive, and any "horses" that descended from ancient lineage of domesticated horses.
also zebras have a long history with african predators, so they are much more prone to aggression.
I'm pulling this from some random place in my head but horses have a strict hierarchy. There's a head horse that runs first and people became the head horse. This is in stark contrast to zebras that don't give a shit and cause chaos.
zebras are wild animals, even tamed they are pretty wild, and are prone to aggressive sitituations, because they have evolved with the predators in africa, so they are much more aggressive compared to other equines.
The random place in your head is likely a CGP Grey video about animal domestication. 😁
I first heard about this reading "guns germs and steel" around 2006 so I'ma guess that's the origin or at least a waypoint for that thought
Because when they tried to ride humans they would break them.
Because riding on their fronts is too intimate.
... Try riding a horse bareback, without a saddle.
It'll give you new meaning to the terms 'ball-buster' and well, 'bareback'.
Real men fear no intimacy.
👏👏👏
My guess would be evolution. Those horses that let us ride them were fed well and cared for by humans and then mated with similar horses to make more and more of the same. Those that didn't let us ride them had to fight for their own food and fight for their own mates and didn't multiply as much. So we essentially happened upon a couple of horses that enjoyed hauling us around, told them to kiss each other, and we got more. Repeat and rinse for tens of thousands of year.
Tons of comments, but no answer from an actual horse.
Way to be a neigh-sayer =P
As a horse on the interwebs, I would have replied, but everyone would just call me a neigh-sayer
I thought that only spiders were on the interwebs?
Nah, it's horses, we just wear spider costumes online
Sleipnir, is that you?
Standard. This place is turning into Reddit faster than a head of state can gas his own office.
They are forced into submission through a process of violence and psychological torture their abusers call "breaking". They have also been selectively bred for docile traits. Horses that resist this process and don't allow their owner to ride them will eventually be written off as being "unsound" and euthanized for whatever excuse they can diagnose them with.
They use behavioral psychology, a system of rewards, i's not violent.
Only wild horses are "broken"
This is the best answer, closest to the truth.
They usually don't and have to be "broken in".
For those few that do so naturally, it's more of a proto-symbiotic relationship where the rider helps provide food and safety, so they're kept around as a pet or dumb kid.
Also, if a predator wants to bite you, having something on your back to throw at them as a distraction can be pretty damn helpful.
Breaking in is just what we call the process of fostering trust and getting the horse slowly used to a rider.
The default setting in a horse's mind is to not allow anything on its back. They will bite and kick you if you try. However, there is a clever way to change that setting, as ancient humans had discovered.
Horses are different from many other animals, such as zebras. Horses are clearly more malleable. That default setting can be changed if you're skilled and patient enough. With zebras though, the setting to bite and kick is pretty much hard coded.
Some animals, such as camels and llamas can also be tamed and even ridden, but they will always know their position in the tier list of life i.e. way above all humans. They will tolerate humans up to a certain point, but once their patience runs out, the unfortunate human in their immediate vicinity will feel it in their skin. These animals are a bit like cats, but 10x more dangerous.
That explains why my Red Dead horses always buck me off. To give their carnivorous friends a treat while they gallop away. Sonofabitch Rockstar, you did it again
Way to self report that you're a bad digital horse caretaker, lol.
Look, they bothered to actually model horse testicular shrinkage in very cold weather.
They have a set of systems designed to gauge how much your horse trusts you, and how well you treat it, whether or not you ride it into having a heart attack or not.
... They honestly did a shockingly good job of portraying at least some of the idiosyncracies of what its like to actually train and ride a horse.
Kinda analagous to how only a few milsim/tac shooters actually get close to portraying a bunch of the idiosyncracies that the vast majority of shooter games don't bother with, but are actually pretty important when using an actual gun.
A thing that often gets left out of video game depictions of horses: they are actually kinda stupid and will do dumb shit fairly often, if not well trained and ridden by a skilled rider.
(And even then, they'll still occasionally do nonsensically dumb things)
Like uh, one thing they could have easily done in RDR2, to be more realistic, but chose not to because it would likely be too annoying to most players:
You should pretty much never, ever, ride a horse along the inside of a railroad track, with all the alternating ties.
You should absolutely never get a horse up to a canter or gallop in the middle of a railroad track.
Not primarily because an unexpected train could cause them to freak out and do something stupid.
But because they are basically guaranteed to trip on the railroad ties, and eventually either stumble, crumple, throw you off, or break their own legs.
Horses will run full speed into a fucking tree and basically kill themselves (and potentially the rider as well), if you command them to and they trust you, or, if they are just sufficiently spooked.
They'll have weird little quirks like 'fuck you, i am not going to step in this specific puddle', for no apparent reason.
The people I used to know who regularly did foxhunts, they would have their horses fairly often try to duck under a low branch... entirely not considering that they have a human on their back, who would then be clothes-lined by that branch.
Shit like that.
Having some dumb horse decision lead to nearly or actually getting thrown from a horse was... more or less, kinda like the way motorcycle guys talk about laying down their bike: It's basically an inevitability that it'll happen to you at some point, so you train for how to deal with it when it happens.
But anyway lol, yeah the horse rearing up on its hind legs is an instictual reaction to a predator in front of them.
They probably aren't actually smart enough to work through the logic of 'i just have to faster than the human, not the wolves or the bear'. They're probably just terrified, and the override kicks in in their brain, and it says 'rear up and trample the bad things'.
That that throws off the human rider probably actually does not occur to them.
I used to watch this video two years ago, and a few other horse history video on that channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMHqp0M0T4Q
It's a more approachable video for general audience so it may not be super scientific. But they included the source/papers in the description from proper academics.
Wild horses were originally not fit for riding. It is found that their bones would not be able to support to be ridden. But at the time, horses also started interacting with human & being domesticated as food & material sources.
But human do realize the power horses have. Human started developing chariots to be pulled by horses. The chariot technology spread around the north eurasian steppe to south in the south-west asia & egypt. But I cannot definitively say if the chariot techbology in egypt or persia came from north or it's developed locally. I haven't exactly find out about the relationship of both region when it comes to chariot technology.
During few thousand years later horses also slowly evolved physicaly to be able to be ridden. And so in later bronze age, nomadic steppe people emerges such as the Saka/Scythians, Xiongnu, etc.
My personal searching two years ago was definitely very focused on central asia/eurasian steppe region. So I cannot say much about the same stuff happening in south-west asia despite I know there are a lot going on in that area at the same time. But then after writing this and re-read the question, this doesn't exactly answer why horses allow human to ride them 🤣🤣 I only say about how human changed horse.
Horse evolution is an overlooked aspect that we ignore often. Think of them like dogs: today, there are several different breeds of varying sizes, some burlier, some sleeker. In the early stages of domestication, this variety wasn't there, but with time and lots of selective (cross)breeding, we got to where we are today.
Belgian Drafts tend to be big, and this one was the absolute unit
Yeah... there's a difference between the kind of horse you bred to work in a team and pull a cart or carriage or train of them...
... and the kind of horse that's a one rider endurance runner vs sprinter...
... and the kind of horse that you would gird with steel armor and sit a steel armored man on them, and then charge them directly into melee combat as heavy shock cavalry.
That glorious equine appears to be about average sized for a Clydesdale. Never heard of the Belgian Draft breed before.
That neck. Wow.
It's a work of fiction, but I highly recommend Last of the Amazons by Stephen Pressfield. He does fantastic, heavily researched historical fictions with an abundance of resources at the end to reaearch the history he bases his plots off of.
It's basically about Eurasian tribes who had horses central to their religious mythos and how they dealt with the Greeks. It's fantastic.
Why do the proletariat allow the bourgeoisie to ride on their backs?
Cows didn't let us ride them, and look what we did to them... Look what we did to them!!!
Yummy milkers
Because we spent generations training and breeding them to allow us.
They get trained. Think about humans for example. There's lots of stuff we don't think twice about doing that aren't necessarily things we would naturally do; they're taught to us socially and we get used to them as part of life. Horses were domesticated, firstly selectively bred to be friendlier to humans and faster, but secondly they still get trained to form a bond with humans and to do what humans want them to do. They get used to being ridden.
It is called breaking them.
The traditional methods is to dominate the horse into accepting the various ropes and controls as well as a rider.
There are more modern approaches which focus on making the horse trust it all.
They don't, they've been domesticated and trained to allow it.
We bred them to be amenable to it and we teach them to do it from the time they are babies.
The same reasons dogs work for us. They are domesticated animals, selective breeding for thousands of years. Then training, teach them when they are young to do complex tasks. They then enjoy the tasks because it makes us happy. Think of sled dogs, or seeing eye dogs. Not exactly a natural thing for them, but once they are trained they really enjoy it.
Why do humans allow cats to ride in their arms?
Because I've trained all of my cats to accept me carrying them around the house...
Oh fuck. They trained ME to be a cat taxi!