Go find a wild horse and ride it, see how much it likes it. Feed it an apple if you like.
Wild horses don't really technically exist (except Przewalski's Horse, but that one also has domesticated blood in it), they are all feral horses, as in they were domesticated before (or their ancestors were), for various reasons (more on this later). Also, people SOMEHOW managed to capture and train horses before which I agree is quite stressful for the horse, but at this point it doesn't... really happen, simply because random feral horses are fucking rare and those that exist are under protection.
Honestly though, feeding it apples (carefully, not running up to one and pushing an apple down it's throat) might actually work out since horses are greedy bastards and more intelligent than they seem. Fuck, I'd classify them as more human than some humans.
Once you get out the hospital, you can tell us how it went.
That's... the point. Horses aren't things you can be cruel with without some serious advantage like a cattle prod (good luck trying to teach it anything that way though) and at that point the horse is about as likely to just charge you or flip the fuck out until it dies because that's the way of the horse. Mutual trust and treats (GIB APPLES HOOMAN) or no-deal.
I find it difficult to accept that it's not cruel to sit atop a horse with 100lbs+ of weight as a person, plus however much the equipment weighs and essentially demand it does things by pulling its head about and squeezing it's ribs, then keep it in a box 'til the next time.
Dude.
DUDE.First of all, 100lbs (that's about 50 kilos, I think...? Fuck, you guys should start using reasonable measurements please) is fucking
nothing to a horse. It proably shits out more in weight than that during one day. Saddles are usually between 10 to 30 (very heavy duty work saddles)kgs, with the various other stuff proably about 5kgs max. The horse weights from about 400kgs to even a fucking tonne. And only complete idiots that want to end up on ground pull reins and "crush" (holy shit, do you actually expect a human to crush a ribs of something that's... I simply can't even...) it's ribs.
And if you were referring to work horses, you have very, very shitty idea how horse collars and harnesses work. First of all, the whole point of those is to make the horse push (essentially, though you still call that pulling), rather than simply pulling. Of course, it wasn't proably created to make horses feel better, but mainly because this way they can push over a tonne and a half easily while they can pull only 1/3 of that, but the point stands and it doesn't actually strain the animal that much. It's actually pretty much required for them to do something since otherwise they get fat or break shit or end up as sasuages.
And, to be perfectly honest, the horses have it better this way. They are greedy and intelligent bastards and they understand that warm, dry and spacious stable with auto-feeding systems and people who go around cleaning them and they get fucking treats and all they do is... carrying a dude that's 1/10th of their weight around from day to day while the rest of the time they happily prance on fresh and green grass? Even the work horses have it pretty good, mainly because if someone uses one then proably they have to which makes people care for them more than for themselves.
And in wild? They all would be dead 10,000 years ago. Horses aren't suited to live in wild, not anymore.
The fact the horse has to be taught to be comfortable doing these things should tell you something. Perhaps that when you point a finger at someone questioning their sanity, there are four others pointing back at you cheeky mare.
It doesn't, not really, and horses don't really mind that you sit on them, they mind the fact that you drag them away from eating/fucking/children to do something more (or you want to eat them), even if getting fat is actually fucking harmful to them and a straight route to becoming sasuages.
And that's the sad truth. If we were to stop using horses completly, it wouldn't be free-range heaven for them, it would be getting sent to butcher-shop. That's where horses without work end. And "wild" horses? There's a reason why they only exist in meaningful numbers in Asia, and that reason being sheer vastness and emptiness of it, and it's pretty much proven that domestication of the horse saved it as a species (proof is that they went extinct in Americas while only domesticated ones survived in Eurasia). The killing of horses is already a problem, very big problem actually. Thousands upon thousands horses are being send annualy to be turned into hot-dogs simply because nobody really wants to use them anymore...
but hey, that's completly okay since horse meat is delicious, right? Maybe we should set up horse farms like we did with pigs or cows... oh wait, we already do that.