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?
Anything you do to a police horse is likely to be treated the same as attacking a human cop so don't do anything below.
Under a horse's neck about where it meets the chest is usually where I put my hand when wanting to push a horse backwards while it is facing me.
You can try grabbing the bridal/reigns while you're up close and then you should have more control of where the horse's head is pointing (and where it more likely to want to move) than the rider.
As has been noted in several other comments, they should be "bomb proofed" so things like loud sounds and flashing lights shouldn't spook them. Might need to try something high intensity and directed. Lasers or acoustics, probably not a great look as our out animal rights comrades will point out. Olfactory might be useful. Sometimes blood or rotting meat will upset our horses. That could be an option. Female horse piss while they are ovulating might be enough to agitate a gelded male horse, pheromones and what not.
If you can do something to the surfaces that horses are expected to walk on... gravel, sludge, oil... anything that will cause a horse to balk at the loss of traction. This isn't guaranteed as some horses are so dead broke you could ride one off of a visible cliff and they wouldn't care.
Narrow pathways and object of a similar size to the horse can sometimes be enough to make them shy away from moving in that direction.
If the mounted police are using verbal commands to their mounts, pay attention to what they say, the volume and inflection. The horse will likely try to obey any command that sounds like the command that their rider is making.
Riding crops and lunge whips. Common training tools that the horse is likely familiar with and will respond to even with a rider on it's back. Crops are the short sticks with a flappy bit at the end that can make a satisfying pop when it hits something. Easy to carry, easy to use, hard to hurt yourself or others. Lunge whips are much longer sticks (4~6 feet long) with a 4~6 foot length of rope on the end as the whip. Makes a much louder noise but takes a whole lot of space around you to use without smacking people around you.
If there is prep time, any artists that can paint crazy geometrical/off perspective shapes on the ground to make it look like the flat ground has holes and/or constant changes in elevation could help to confuse a horse as to how confident it can be when taking a step.
Oh, almost forgot. Lead ropes. Thick cotton/sythetic fiber ropes with a large spring clip on the end. If you an get close enough to clip the rope to the ring under the horse's chin or on the right/left side of the jaw you now have a way to pull a horse around and possibly to the ground with a group of people.
I wonder, could you do the crazy geometrical shapes on banners? Like "dazzle" camouflage, or some optical illusions? I'm not sure if being on a soft fabric like a banner would yield the same result.
Or on tarps, to combine with @Awoo 's tarp thoughts below?
Possibly the bomb proofing that horses should have gone through might have given them some resistance to things like fluttering banners.
But anything that would make distances hard to make out for a prey animal that doesn't have forward binocular vision. So if the banner patterns somehow worked with the surrounding landscape to make it look like a wide two lane road was barely one horse width wide might help to confuse the animal about how much space it has to work with.
Second but... any pattern on a banner that could be carried and then deployed on the ground to make a solid roadway look like there is a huge hole in instead might be worth the effort.
If there is prep time, any artists that can paint crazy geometrical/off perspective shapes on the ground to make it look like the flat ground has holes and/or constant changes in elevation could help to confuse a horse as to how confident it can be when taking a step.
Wile E Coyote has entered the chat
Simply paint a tunnel in the wall and have the protestors walk through it
Never been to the UK, but how are cross walks painted on the ground? In the USA they typically are wide horizontal bars, white or yellow. So if the ones in the UK were of a different pattern, I'd think that painting cattle grid/gards (roughly a series of wide rectangle shape) on the ground with might be feasible.
Footage of a more agressive charge for reference
A cursory glance at Wikipedia suggests holding your ground in a close-knit formation is the strat. Granted that requires a hell of a lot of discipline and prep across a lot of people.
The problem is, the discipline required mandates significant training with a group. There's a reason that even though pikes were around as a weapon, cavalry was still effective for centuries after the first medieval pike victories. Edit: to expand a little, the effective early pike users of the medieval era were Flemish & Swiss militias, who drilled and trained together repeatedly, and the Scots, who I assume were just pissed enough at the English to not break. Eventually everyone adopted the pike & drill as the answer to cavalry. The pike mutated and shrank over the years as infantry firepower increased, eventually becoming the plug, then ring bayonet. It turns out even a 5-6 foot long wooden stick with a knife on it, which is what a musket & bayonet is, is sufficient in well drilled hands to deter cavalry. (Any hints taken about the size & design of the sticks your protest signs are mounted on are completely left to your own imagination).
That's a big ask for folks you might have met an hour before, and also why traditionally cavalry was the urban anti riot solution.
Effective defenses against them in an urban situation relied on barricades and channeling the cavalry into alleys, where the cavalry could be flanked and Minecrafted. In addition, especially in older European cities, dropping roof slates onto the cavalry was the urban worker's answer. Helmets don't matter when ten pounds of stone lands on your head. I can't recall if the "stretch a rope across a street" idea ever happened or if my memory is filling in gaps with Looney Tunes cartoons.
Edit: I did mention barricades. To expand on some thoughts I've had about that, organized groups of protesters should start practicing using cars & trucks for barricade & escort duty, particularly since "driving into the crowd" attacks were pretty common last summer and will likely only become more frequent. So , a few cars at walking speed ahead of the protest to block off intersections they pass through, with other groups behind and on parallel streets.
(Thank you medieval history degree I rarely use)
Some things never change! As long as we live, people will probably be tussling with cavalry.
As for the stretched cable, I know chilean protesters used a cable attached to fixed anchors to stop a literal APC. I'm not sure how well it would work against horses
It’s extremely easy to stop and halt APCs. Obscure all vindows and vision blocks. Certain barricades they will get stuck on. They need a lot of room to move and turn wide so channeling them into tight specs helps. A big APC is scary but if you can get people on it or near it then you will be able to damage radio equipment, lights, and people’s ability to use it.
I remember seeing something about bringing a spool or two of fishing line and laying it at ankle/knee height to prevent charges like this. It'll trip up unmounted cops and break their advance, but don't know how well it would work with mounties. Would the horses get tripped up/spooked by fishing line?
Bonus for this tactic, if they're using smoke/tear gas the line is essentially invisible and after two or three instances of eating shit because they charged into line, they'll start slowing their charges even without line.
I think tripping them would depend on how heavy the line is and how well secured it is, as well as what the horse is doing. The kinetic energy of a horse at gallop is... impressive.
I think someone who has more personal experience with horses would be better able to answer if it would spook them.
Edit: I suppose more of a net arrangement with cans on the end could be effective, as the horse's legs would be entangled and the noise would follow them, which should spook them.
Although I mentioned in another answer below, horses in a blind panic are incredibly dangerous. If one panics into a crowd at full speed, people will die, between the horse & the ensuing crowd stampede and possible crush. Human stampedes are deadly! The Hillsborough disaster killed 96 people, for example.
This was actually a concept I discussed in a thread when I was looking at potential ways to prevent the American cop charges. Those charges rely on the energy of the rush to spook undisciplined protesters and basically anything on the ground between the protesters and cops would prevent the cops from rushing with the energy they want to.
Even after months of military training it was hard to get guys to walk in formation correctly. Let alone a bunch of “civilian” (for lack of a better term) protestors who don’t have that time, training or commitment.
This is the key. Think of it this way: somehow you find a bunch of large poles at a protest and think "hmm, I know pikes were used against cavalry. These poles are essentially pikes. Let's grab them!"
Across the square, you see cops on horseback. "Great! We've got the weapons to take them on!". You and the other people who grabbed the poles make your way to the front of the crowd, and prepare to receive charge.
The horses advance. And how come you couldn't tell from across the square how big the horses + riders are? It's like 7-8 feet from their hooves to the riders helmet!
Still, you're holding a 12 foot pole, and you can do math. You can definitely hold off the horses! You and the people you...just...met...20 minutes ago? You know you will definitely hold your ground, right? But what about the person next to you? And the person next to them? And those horses are getting even larger, and you can hear the metal shod hooves...and you know you'll catch charges if you attack the horse or rider and are caught afterwards...and that person next to you is starting to shake a bit...
If only there was a dedicated group or party of people to instill discipline and organize the working class. A vanguard if you will.
and, especially, by standing firm in face of the onslaught, cavalry charges often failed against infantry, with horses refusing to gallop into the dense mass of enemies,[4] or the charging unit itself breaking up.
Interesting. This is basically depicted in the video you linked from 2010. When the protesters come back and are too tightly bunched up the horses will not challenge the dense crowd and back up.
This is presumably why police only use horses as loose attacks. They break up a crowd forcibly taking space from protesters and then immediately deploy police with shields in front of the line of horses, the horse line then sits behind the police line. Horses can't hold their own line against a dense crowd.
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.
I believe what is needed is retreating upwards to a large hill, some mud and rain, and as many longbows as you can muster
this is literally the medieval counter to the shield walls riot cops like to use. Though if a bunch of people used halberds against cops they'd probably just shoot them (unfair imo).
You could bring a bannerflag on a large pole to the protest
Bring some camel riders for a +9 against calvary. They require a lot of gold, but a couple of them surrounded by pikemen will kill any calvary charge.
I think the correct answer is to shoot the rider right in the fucking mouth, but I don't think we're there yet. The stuff about building barriers is good, but the idea that we can go back to midevil polearm tactics is delusional. The state would happily kill 100 protesters in retalliation for every fallen horse-cop and dog-cop. They are psycopaths.
Well then, tactical nukes it is. Who’s here’s allowed to buy smoke detectors?
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”.
SMDH it's like you all forgot everything your Persian forbears taught you.
Didn't someone in Bristol do the classic Wolololo on a cop dog by giving it pizza
SMDH it’s like you all forgot everything your Persian forbears taught you.
Most of my knowledge of history comes from 300. So I assume the strategy is to be bisexual and let the supermutants do the work.
Let's be honest, we'd all surrender willingly to Xerxes. Dude knew how to party.
Yes, put seriously; you could take the piss/musk/pheromones from animals that scare horses (or even other horses like another user mentioned) to spook them. Getting a horse to spook is more effective (as far as nullifying force-multiplication) than killing/maiming it imo.
Thnx for doing the homework for me, I'll have to read up on this later tonight.
o7
Hopefully this quarter we'll get a favorable review and steal some of the funding from the Pig Poop Balls Dissemination Department.
What the hell do they need that big of a budget for anyway?
Just read that (it's only 10 pages, for the curious). Interesting and useful stuff!
Does bobcat urine work? It's commercially available as a rodent repellant, and very stinky.
Woah, since when did I become the animal piss expert around here!?!
:screm3:
To be honest I really don't know with certainty.
I assume the bobcat piss is 50% effective (vs. rodents) because it's a natural predator's scent but also 50% effective because it's very stinky and rodents have sensitive noses. I dunno how reliant horses are on their sense of smell, or what kind of "relationship" horses have with bobcats in the wild. If I was a horse, I think I'd be pretty indifferent about them tbh.
Edit: You knowwwww, there's a way you could find out...
Tiger or other large predator urine might be more effective. First, you gotta get the tiger urine though...and I'm pretty sure Joe Exotic's place, who I assume did a brisk business in tiger urine if anywhere did, is fully closed now I believe.
Although a quick Google says bear urine is commercially available, and I blame all of you for my next month of ad results.
I grew up watching the South Korean students protesting against the government & the US in the 80s. The level of organization and coordination they had was absolutely amazing.
Every time I see something like this, I just imagine that US police would start indiscriminately shooting.
Lets see, concertina/razor wire or any mobility-inhibiting ground devices such as mass steel ball bearings if you're on hard surfaces or mass three by three by three potholes as well if you're in soft terrain and have enough prep time. Simply using ropes to entangle the calvary legs or to create an anti-calvary barrier is good as well.
Solid blunt bludgeoning objects are always good as well. They're not just useful for incapacitating or dismounting the rider but in desperate circumstances easily allow the wielder to break the knee joints of a horse permanently crippling it's ability to assault your forces and opens the rider injury from being pinned to the ground by the fallen horse.
If you're looking to create an impromptu anti-calvary barrier, a barrage of molotov cocktails in front of moving or charging mounted infantry can frighten the horse from approaching, and should they be timed right frighten the horse into bucking backwards and dismounting their rider. Alternatively utilizing knee-height or higher objects to form a barricade is effective at breaking the mobility of calvary on open ground, forcing them to either waste time maneuvering around it or relying on ground infantry to move in to clear a path.
Classically stone-throwing if no other resources are on hand is always a good tool to motivate horsemen being used to corral your group in to keep their distance.
Of course being in America, doing any of these actions opens you up to being shot to death for trying to defend yourself from being trampled to death - so the best defense here in a stateside protest is thr disciplined wielding of firearms in self-defense against the State. I'm sure any pigs on horses that fancy themselves as the modern dragoon or hussar are well aware of why nobody uses horses in warfare anymore.
You can also smack a horse behind its front leg joints to make them fold and drop to its front "knees". Might get lucky and watch the rider go flying over the top.
Hm that'd probably be easier in the situation the Bristolians found themselves in with the police calvary primarily being used as a herding mechanism.
Most police horses are trained to be spook-proof so things that would come up in a training would not likely spook them. I.e loud noises, sudden pain, crowded spaces, large sudden movements, etc.
My first suggestion would be a large bundle of balloons released in conjunction with air horns, since loud pops and whistles would be trained for de-spooking. But balloons are not practical to have around during a protest lol
Gotta be some things that spook em. There must be surfaces they'd not like crossing or unusual objects that they wouldn't like. I was thinking plastic bright blue ground covering to lay in front of protesters. Or foam machines? Cheap, mess free, would fly around a bit. Not sure if it would work, only one way to find out.
That's the ticket, trying to find something that wouldnt be trained to destimulate.
Since they are prey animals sudden intense stimulation that is unfamiliar is the highest chance of producing a spook as you dont want a freeze response.
Since they are shoed I dont think that a ground based response would yield the reaction.
I'm wondering if protesters could design their own version of that heat-ray thing the US cops have been testing. Directional heat that would make the horses back up regardless of rider.
Stick a fork in the door latch of a microwave and hook it up to some car batteries
Cutting neck reigns may be an option but that requires proximity and finesse to not hurt the horse
Shit for the environment but a large mass of plastic bags propelled by a leaf blower may work but bags on a stick is a common training.
Maybe a modified leaf blower tip to make a loud sound
I would try large sheets tied to poles. Waving them back and forth would create large, billowing shapes that the horses probably aren't used to seeing.
Laser pointers possibly.
Closed ranks and a strong line with something like overlapping shields as horses won't charge a solid wall, but it takes a lot of determination and courage.
Honestly, a lot of solutions just aren't going to be very nice for the horse, but tripwires and fire have traditionally worked well.
Ok, here are my thoughts. So the primary purposes of horses is twofold.
- Charges to use shock to break up a group
- Taking up space/ acting as a force multiplier for cops on foot.
Those two tactics need to be discussed separately. Firstly to counter a charge. Horses will seldom charge directly through a densley packed mass of people, especially if some have polearms, such as flagpoles. The issue is that requires a vast amount of discipline. While this tactic might have utility, it is not the best because it requires a lot of discipline your group of protesters likely doesn't have.
Using molotov cocktail, or create a temporary barricade seems like the best options to me, as these would break any charge by horses.
As for the second issue, that is a situation in which you are dancing with horses at much closer quarters, so the molotov cocktail world be highly impractical and dangerous. Those cops up on there horses as they force people around might be vulnerable though, as they don't have shields and seem to be to be along for a brick to the face. Failing that, again the flagpoles could be used to try and dismount the pigs.
Ok, finally, I saw people suggesting this, but don't go around trying to grab the reins of a fast moving horse, unless you want to get trampled.
I might be wrong, please do give me feedback
I think one thing demonstrated here was the difficulty of controlling the protest that was posed by the layout of this area of Bristol. It is on a 4-way junction with multiple small sidepaths. It's very difficult here to get people into a controllable funnel.
I was in Egypt during the Arab spring and people would throw Molotov cocktails bricks to spook horses and push police back
Besides the fact that I don't want to hurt animals who didn't ask to be pigs, it's also bad optics in my personal experience. People are turned off by "violent rioters abusing animals" and it's easier to paint protesters as "terrorists" and enact policy accordingly.
Watch live pd and cops and pov/body cam footage of cops as much as you can. Get a view and idea of their tactics and equipment. Etc. this is great in Minecraft
How has nobody pointed out the extremely obvious, cheap solution of laser pointers yet?
There's an amazing video from the Chile protests where the riot police are retreating and their ATV is on fire and they can't do shit because they can't fucking see anything. Can't find it right now though.
You're going to laugh but. Because they're illegal here for that reason.
