In this video I think it's demonstrated incredibly powerfully what importance needs to be placed upon anti-horse tools.
The horses do the bulk of the work in creating space that allows the police line to tighten the noose here. Without them they never would have controlled these crowds with people on multiple sides of them. They could not have maintained control.
There must be simply and effective methods to spook these horses without causing a danger to them. Something that could be deployed that would make the riders tell their superiors "we can't deploy because the horses would be spooked by x".
Anyway. What are other people's thoughts here? Obviously this protest was unprepared for a fight (although several police have been hospitalised). What could small groups of 1-5 have done in the wider engagement to make things go differently?
From that perspective the horses are just a force-multiplier, and the primary objective of protestors is resisting/defeating the dismounted cops. Either way the thing is organisation, prep, and discipline.
Yeah I see that too. But in circumstances like this it's not really about "defeating" the police but about protecting the protesters. In a crowd that does not want to have an all out fight with the cops you can't just beat the dismounted cops. The only effective tactic as I see it is to defeat their ability to do what they want to do, and in this case it is to use the horses to herd the protesters into an easily controlled space and then to keep them there for however long it takes to mop up smaller numbers of protesters not caught in the kettle.
What the protest needs to do from that perspective is to be spread in such a way that cops don't have the resources to maintain any kind of control however you can't get an entire protest to act as a collective like that (without many months of fighting the state for experience) so in this case you're left with the question of "what can small groups of 1-5 people do in this scenario to change the outcome of things?"
Right, I see what you mean. I'm intrigued by the huge blue tarp approach mentioned in another comment thread.
Interestingly if you google "horse won't walk on tarp" you get a tonne of training videos. It does look like it takes very conscious effort to train them into it and they still don't like it.