This makes interesting reading. Well, it’s more mind-blowing than interesting, with almost 10% of drivers admitting that they don’t know how to behave when they encounter horses. Even more surprising is that the figure rises when you ask younger drivers (or Londoners) about the subject!
You’d expect that even a monkey would realise that when you are passing an animal weighing upwards of half a metric tonne, usually with a young girl on top of it, you’d slow down and give it wide berth. For people who haven’t yet acquired the mental capacity of monkeys the Highway Code clarifies the situation further:
214
Animals. When passing animals, drive slowly. Give them plenty of room and be ready to stop. Do not scare animals by sounding your horn, revving your engine or accelerating rapidly once you have passed them. Look out for animals being led, driven or ridden on the road and take extra care. Keep your speed down at bends and on narrow country roads. If a road is blocked by a herd of animals, stop and switch off your engine until they have left the road. Watch out for animals on unfenced roads.
215
Horse riders and horse-drawn vehicles. Be particularly careful of horse riders and horse-drawn vehicles especially when overtaking. Always pass wide and slowly. Horse riders are often children, so take extra care and remember riders may ride in double file when escorting a young or inexperienced horse or rider. Look out for horse riders’ and horse drivers’ signals and heed a request to slow down or stop. Take great care and treat all horses as a potential hazard.
The survey conducted by the AA is quite worrying, and raises a number of questions. Setting aside the obvious one about the intellects of people who are deemed competent to hold a driving licence and yet are clearly too stupid to work it out for themselves, what the hell are driving instructors doing when younger drivers – those who have recently passed their tests – don’t know what to do? The Highway Code is there for all to see, and at the very least the topic should be covered verbally if it can’t be dealt with using real situations.
Apparently, nearly 20% of those questioned believe horses shouldn’t be allowed on the roads. The simple fact is that greater than 99% of horse riders are courteous and don’t deliberately get in the way, and they get off the road as soon as they can. Contrast this with cyclists – of whom 99% are complete arseholes who get in the way on purpose, and who definitely shouldn’t be allowed on the roads – and you can see that everything is the wrong way round.
I do everything in my power to get my pupils to encounter horses at some stage on their lessons. I take them on single track roads near stables at the time of day when horses are being walked out so we can deal with them. As I’ve said before, girls on horses (the majority of riders) usually give a friendly wave of thanks. Male riders can be less friendly (I don’t know why that is), and racehorse riders (the minority of riders around my way, and usually failed jockeys) are miserable and arrogant little sods most of the time. Racehorses are useful training tools because they are usually restive and don’t like walking, so it gives us an opportunity to stop or even switch off the engine in some cases. In fact, on my way to a lesson tonight I had to slow right down for a horse being led along the roadside which was obviously a little edgy, eliciting a polite wave from the male handler.
It isn’t that difficult to find horses and horse riders in many places – even in urban areas – and many instructors really ought to be driving just a few miles extra in order to cover the subject properly instead of hanging round the test centres conserving fuel. Obviously, not everyone can experience horses and riders first hand on their lessons, and in those cases the instructor should absolutely and definitely be covering it verbally – which many clearly aren’t.