I drove my stallion, in Arab shows... and Arabian Stallions Driving class in an arena that suddenly seems very cramped is an exhilerating experience!
I'll grant that driving can be really neat. If there were someplace around here where it would be safe to drive down the road and see things, it'd be neat... but only with a really bomb-proof horse... Being strapped to a panicked horse in a cart is a terrifying prospect.
I guess that guy does have brakes on the rig, so if he has one that just runs, he can drag them to a stop, or apply partial brake to wear them out.
We were out at the Olympic Horse Park in Conyers - my trainer had trailered a bunch of our horses out there and we were riding over the 3 day course, it's a nice ride through fields and woods and water, and really we were looking for something we could jump so that we could say "we trained on the 3 day course!"
The course has been allowed to fall into horrible disrepair, because it wasn't worth maintaining -- of course everything out there in its original state was WAY too big for any normal horse to negotiate (5' stone walls with big telephone poles embedded in the top, 8' drops, stuff like that . . . I could see my mare's eyes popping as she looked at it. "Don't worry, baby . . . I ain't takin' you near that stuff.") The natural fences were too overgrown to jump as the plantings had been allowed to run wild - so the hedges were like 20' tall. Oh, well.
Anyhow, we were skirting the edge of the big open field where most of the water complex used to be (now dry), when we encountered a group of folks practicing combined driving. A pretty chestnut mare in a light cart was trotting between a series of posts in the ground.
When our horses saw the cart, they went NUTS! As near as I can figure, they thought the little chestnut was about to be EATEN by this whirring big black thing that was hot on her heels. Even my placid mare was snorting and rearing and plunging. A couple of people fell off.
It was actually pretty funny, although the people who fell off didn't think so . . . :-D
Oh, and it's not just harness horses that he breaks this way. He breaks them all to a wagon before riding them. This just makes the wagon part a whole lot easier and safer for both horse and "driver". Before he had this, he was using a ground slide. Blade was broke to a wagon. It makes for a pretty bomb-proof saddle horse.