(Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

Warning: This article is not intended for closed-minded people who have already made up their minds about the issue and are not prepared to budge from their position.  It contains scientific analysis, conjecture and pure speculation.

Sub-Warning: At just over 5000 words, this is one of the longest articles you will find on this site. 

Before reading any further, please take a moment to study the picture that accompanies this article.  What do you notice?  If you said "Three horses completing a jumping race without their jockeys," then you can move to the head of the class.

This picture really is worth a thousand words.

As a horse trainer, I have devoted a significant amount of my life to trying to "get inside the horses head" and understand what motivates these wonderful animals.  I would not dare to suggest that I have completely cracked the code, but I can honestly say that I have made some significant progress.

Some of the things I have learned include:

1. Horses are naturally nervous and fearful creatures.  This is a good thing, because it helps them to survive in the wild, where allowing something unfamiliar to get too close to you can easily result in death.
2. Horses have natural curiosity.  This is a powerful instinct in the horse, and it can be observed by the fact that when a horse is frightened by something and runs away, he will nearly always return to investigate the thing which frightened him (unless it gives pursuit).  Native Americans in the days of the "Old West" exploited this trait to catch wild mustangs.
   
3. Most horses are speed addicts.  I don't mean they like going to rave parties.  I mean that when given an opportunity to run, they enjoy it, and the faster they are allowed to go, the more they enjoy it.
4. All horses are inherently lazy and will not do anything unless sufficiently motivated to do it.  For example I could put a stallion in a paddock and he is not likely to jump over the fence unless there is something on the other side that he wants badly enough (like a mare or some very enticing food) to encourage him to do it, or there is a predator chasing him and he is in fear for his life.

Now there are a few things about these statements that could need clarification.  For example, you might ask: "Brad, if most horses naturally like to run fast, then why do jockeys carry whips?"

Well to answer that, I will first say that I wish they did not carry them, and secondly that although what most people are focusing on in a race is the finish where they see jockeys going nuts doing everything possible to urge their mounts on, what the uninformed spectator may not notice is the fact that for most of the race, most of the jockeys are trying to hold their horses back and stop them from going at full speed (which is what the horse really wants to do).

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