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 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 movement, 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 cooperation 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 permission 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 animal in a state of moral disorder, act like oil