Modern cavalry war horses

It's acting as a makeshift blindfold. Horses are still prey animals and will spook. So it keeps the horse calm by not letting him see some of the things around him and lets him focus on what his rider is doing on the ground.

don't ruin my dreams

Haha well if it makes you feel better in my drill team we wear costumes and last year we were salsa dancers so the horses wore sombreros and we even had little ear holes for them in their hats.

that sounds so fucking cute

Only reason I can think of is a sheild, but idk I'm not a soldier

Its inhumane to send soldiers to die needlessly. But look at pretty much every war ever.

I've been around horses for going on nine years now. This isn't mistreatment. It's against the horses' instinct to lay down and not run from the loud sounds and everything else that would scare them (horses are prey animals, they scare easy). But this comes nowhere near abuse. No amount of training can force a horse to do this; you can beat a horse to train him to do something but you can never flat out force him to do something like this. If the horse wanted to he could get up and trot off. This can't be trained or forced: this is a bond between horse and rider so strong that the horse will go against all of his gut feeling and instinct to stay with his rider. Some of yall may say there's no such thing but I know for a fact there is.

It's the same with dogs, so I don't see why it can't be with other domesticated animals...