THE SPURS AND THEIR EFFECTS 



learn to support the contact of the rider's legs 

 calmly and without impatience. 



The first effect of the contact is, therefore, to 

 make the horse raise one or both hind legs. But, by 

 our training, we obtain instead the forward move- 

 ment, the front leg gaining ground on the side of 

 the pressure. After the first step, comes the second, 

 and then the trot and gallop, all associated with a 

 more or less complex system of signs, based on 

 pressures of the rider's legs. This is sufficient for 

 ordinary riding. But when the horse revolts, no 

 matter what the occasion for his disobedience 

 or disorder, we employ the spurs to reenforce the 

 effects of the legs. 



What, then, can the spurs do? Without cooper- 

 ation of the hand, nothing. But the two, hand and 

 spurs, acting together, constrain the animal to a 

 position of equilibium, in which all his bodily 

 forces are assembled under a center of gravity, in 

 such wise that the horse cannot displace this 

 collection of its powers without the rider's permis- 

 sion and intelligent direction. For in order to 

 displace its body, in case of revolt, the horse would 

 have to use its muscles in a way impossible for it by 

 the law of its nature. These powerful effects of the 

 spurs are, therefore, neither brutal, nor abrupt, nor 

 provocative. Their action is entirely mechanical, 

 and therefore rationally calming and pacifying. 



In other words, the spurs, as they affect an an- 

 imal in a state of moral disorder, act like oil 



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