For people who are into dogs, there are a variety of ways to show dogs, but the two most common ways that people are generally aware of are agility and the breed ring. With horses, those not involved tend to only think of horse racing as forms of competition, but there are many others. Cutting horse competitions, for example, involve a rider and horse isolating a single cow from the herd and attempting to block the cow from rejoining the herd. It often looks like good defensive basketball where one point guard attempts to block the pass of another. Then there are reining horses, which compete in agility trials. Competitions of cutting and reining horses stress an aspect of equestrian talents we’re not used to seeing.
Horse racing has conditioned us to see horses as straight line racers, but horses can be quite nimble and have good change of direction ability. Reining horses are very well trained, as well as physically gifted. A reining horse is willing and responsive to its rider. The goal is to make the horse respond to commands without the commands being given as overt commands. As with cutting, reining horses are prized for their agility and change of direction skills. For those not familiar with horse competitions, think about the skill set for punt returners and kick returners in football. Kick returners get the ball with an open field in front of them, have to find an opening, and run towards it, straight line speed to hit that hole early before the lanes clog is prized. This is what you look for in a race horse; you want a horse that can run a distance with a combination of speed burst and stamina. For reining horses, the skill set is more like that of punt returners. In football, a punt returner often gets the ball with a clogged field and has to immediately make a cut or two to gain any position. They need to have sharp lateral agility, but high end speed matters less because the lanes are often already congested. For reining horses, they are required to change direction on a dime and be able to move accurately at different speeds.
For many people, horse racing is the easier competition for a spectator to grasp so it has more casual fans, but in terms of what is interesting to watch, reining horses perform feats of agility that are very interesting to watch.
