Confession: gonna go off on a complete tangent here.
Quote Originally Posted by TaZZerath View Post
Plus years of breeding and genetics has them 'built' this way. To put them sitting in a paddock eating grass can sometimes actually depress a horse more because they aren't doing what they instinctively want to do, which is RUN, and run FAST.
If by "years" you mean "millennia," then yes, you're absolutely right. Horses were first domesticated by humans on the Eurasian steppes about 5500 years ago. And yes, there is definitely a bond between humans and horses. I don't own any animals, but scientifically speaking all domesticated animals have some genetically in built propensity to... well... relate to humans.

And this is no accident. Ever wondered why only some animals like dogs, cats, horses, cows, sheep etc. have been domesticated, while others like zebras, lions, tigers etc. remain wild? Even wild animals that have been born and raised in captivity can still easily turn wild. The truth is that they've always been wild. Again, no accident.

When humans first figured out how to domesticate animals, one of the single biggest factors that they had to consider was the animal's temperament. One reason why horses have been domesticated but zebras haven't is partially due to temperament (the other being that zebras aren't physically capable of load-bearing like horses can). Zebras are really aggressive and hostile pricks. Far different from their tame equine cousins. And they have to be, considering that zebras share habitats with big hunting animals like jackals, lions, leopards etc. - they evolved a mean streak as a behavioural means of defence. Horses can gallop away from predators, but zebras are more likely to be outrun by things like freakin' cheetahs, so they also needed to be prepared to kick the crap out of anything that comes near them.

So you take this already more amicable temperament in certain animals. Humans then take them and take care of them. Provide food, shelter etc. - a bond forms. The animal learns to trust the human and soon forms a form of mutual relationship. Thus the animal has become a member of the household, and the Latin word for house is domus (as in the notorious Monty Python line, "Romani Ite Domum" ("Romans go home")), and thus anything that is of the house is domesticus. The household animal is now domesticated.

But that's not all! Some animals may have actually initiated domestication with humans! Yeah. Instead of humans seeking out these animals, some animals came and sought humans out! 2 common examples: dogs and cats. It's believed that the earliest ancestor of the domesticated dog (which would've been more wolf-like) approached human settlements and started defending those humans from things like other animals. The humans started rewarding them with food and shelter, and thus dog became man's best friend. Early ancestors of the domesticated cat did something similar; and for some odd reasons, in two different places independently of each other -- in the Middle East and China. Although I think modern domesticated cats are descendant from the ones that were domesticated in the Middle East. Anyway, these early felines, similar to their canine brethren, approached humans and started killing off vermin like rats, who were eating away at the humans' stored food supplies. And just as with dogs, humans rewarded the cats with food, shelter and uploading videos.

There are 14,200 year old graves that show humans buried alongside dogs. Cats were domesticated about roughly 8000 years ago, and we know that Ancient civilisations like Egypt even started making cat memes^worshipping them. Domestication of animals was a big deal and something that seriously allowed societies to evolve into civilisations. Domesticating livestock meant that we could farm our meat and dairy and that we didn't have to waste time and resources hunting and gathering all the time; agricultural upgrade! Domestication of other animals again freed us to develop more things -- we were wasting as much time chasing rats or fleeing from predators. We had cats to chase away our pests and dogs to protect us now. And we even formed an alliance with dogs as pack hunters.

Contrast this with societies that didn't do this, like Australia. Australians never fully domesticated any animals, and this was really because there are no native animals here that have the appropriate traits for domestication. The closest they came to was the semi-domestication of the dingo. And this was because dingoes are descendant from already previously domesticated stone-age dogs who'd migrated to the Australian continent, but then they evolved without human companionship and became feral. But the Indigenous Australians did occasionally use dingoes as cooperative hunters and watchdogs, but they were never truly domesticated.