For millenaries, the horse is an integral part of the human's life: their use was yet well-known and very popular at the time of the North American Indians for example, who domesticated the Appaloosa horse for their trips and to make war as well. More recently, the army worldwide used to use horses to deliver some messages or moving faster. Nowadays the relationship between the man and the horse fleshed out, and it is more and more based on the respect of the animal.
Equine communication
The horse is a very smart animal, which has been domesticated and controlled by the human race millenaries ago: indeed it is a faithful and very close to human mate. It also is a very expressive animal, but it is not always easy to decipher: however there are many precise codes which are well-known for a long time, to help the horse owners communicating with their animal. So a horse which raises its ears shows that it is attentive to its interlocutor. On the contrary, the flatten down ears mean that the horse is not prompt to communicate, and even threatening. All these codes are perfectly known by those who work with horses, and enable them to do wonders provided that the codes are well deciphered and exploited consequently.
Ethology, what is it?
In every sense, the ethology is a greek word that means "habits study": in more concrete terms, it refers to the study of the behaviour of a species in its natural environment, but also in more precise conditions of life like in captivity and so on. The ethology is a science which is interested not only in several behaviours of the studied subject, but also in what cause these different behaviours. Since a few years, the equine ethology is fast-growing: more and more people choose to turn towards what became over the years a real way of riding.