Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Question about horses

I love Westerns, but I’ll admit that the only horses I’m familiar with come from an engine or a motor.
But an awful lot of the Westerns I love feature gunfire from a saddle at a dead gallop on horseback or maybe a wagon or coach with the team at a dead run.
I know nothing about horses, but guns and shooting, OTHO, I’ve spent a lifetime around.
I wouldn’t say impossible, but very damn difficult to have any kind of accuracy in that situation.
Ever done it or seen it done for real? Comments?
7mm

The horses they were using must have been deaf. Try cranking off a .45 Colt round a few inches from the average horse's ear, and see what happens!
Jerry

I used to do cowboy mounted shooting.

You can be pretty damned accurate off a horse.

It helps if the horse is broken to gunfire though.

Barry can tell you about mounted cowboy shooting competitions, Ive never participated, so I don't know the degree of accuracy involved, they shoot blanks, so much different than a single projectile shot from a moving object. My feel is, it's more about horsemanship than shooting, but I could be wrong?
Ive seen guys make good shots mounted horseback, but from a standing animal, not at a gallop.

This. There's an entire sport built off the idea of mounted shooting.

Horses can be trained to tolerate gunfire. I have one that does pretty well. That said, accurate shooting from horseback is quite difficult. The cowboy mounted shooting crowd uses single action revolvers in .45 Colt shooting blackpowder blanks, which essentially turn them into little shotguns. Burning grains of powder melt the surface of the balloon popping it, so precise aiming isn't really required.

I've known some horses that were broke to it. I have a couple young ones now that will be in fact. They also sell ear plugs for the ponies too.

I've read the cavalry used to puncture eardrums but I'm not sure if that was for gunfire or artillery or both.

cowboy action shooters do all the time -and bust balloons at fulll speed.




but they use blanks and the ranges is close. and they have ear plugs for the horses..

A hunting friend's horse would go bonkers if it heard the safety click off. No shooting from his back.

Here's a few pics of my favorite shooting horse from years ago.

I competed off him, and had a wild west show, where I did trick shooting while horseback.

Shooting a balloon being held between a guy's knees.



In the air.



Competition.



Rifle's can be tricky.

Most of the shooters I ran with didn't use earplugs for the horses. They just trained them.

A few of us used to get together and shoot live ammo... Better be an excellent horseman, and marksman. Mostly we shot holes in prickly pear cactus as we ran by. You can be pretty accurate.

You can shoot while mounted on any horse...ONCE.

In the movies a horse can run forever at a full gallop.
I know it varies from horse to horse and condition just like humans, but what is realistic??

You have bank robbers chased for days in the movies. How long is a horse good for in a pursuit like that?

Thanks

At a dead run... I wouldn't ride any horse more than a few minutes.

At a slow lope, given some rest and time to cool off, you could get 3-4 hours out of one in good shape.

You can sure ride a horse to permanent injury or death pretty quick.

Yeah, I think some of us are missing the point. I can understand shooting mounted on a horse that’s broken to gunfire. I don’t think that’d be much different from offhand unsupported. But at a dead run from a saddle, or even a wagon has got to be a completely different ball game.
Maybe a melon or a stationery target at short distances, but a moving target, better yet also mounted at a run, has gotta be a helluva feat!
Hollywood’s full of stuff like that, but I’ve got an idea of the mechanics of such a stunt. Try holding a revolver or a rifle steady in a car on a bumpy road! A horse or a wagon hasn’t got near the suspension of a vehicle!
Might be a good trick for Terry to try on Outdoor Channel’s “Hollywood Weapons”!
7mm

Personally, I will pass up a shot if I can't dismount to shoot. Just too many unknowns shooting from a live animal. The movies do not always depict real life which is what some said earlier. The scenes are shot from different angles and most shots are rehearsed or retaken several times. The horses and actors are trained before the shot is actually filmed.

There is a vast difference between the Cowboy Action Shooters firing off their horses they've trained to ignore gunfire -- blanks -- and the old timers and cowboys who actually rode horses for a living and might actually have had need only rarely to fire from their horses' backs.

The CAS members have fired literally dozens of thousands of rounds each, training themselves and their horses for "action shooting." Fun and games. Back in the old days, very very few cowboys, sheriffs, ranchers & farmers, even soldiers, could expend the money to practice any acceptable accuracy required to shoot from their horses' backs. They just could not afford it. When a Colt's six shooter cost near the equivalent of a month's pay, and a box of cartridges cost upwards of $1.00, money was too dear to go blasting it away at tin cans and empty whiskey bottles.

As for what you have seen for nearly 100 years in the movies ... boys and girls, do not believe any of it. All that stuff up on the silver screen or the teevee tube, is there for one reason and one reason only: entertainment. Authenticity has virtually no place in western flicks. Believe me. I know.

Just relax, have some popcorn, a Coke, and finish off with a Snickers bar and enjoy the flick.

L.W.

the best mounted shots are those boys i knew from Arkansas that grew up shooting running deer from the bed of a rolling pickup, at night

Idiotic putting a horse through mounted shooting in other than absolutely necessary circumstances. Their hearing is just as sensitive to loud noises as ours if not more so. plus being unexpected it causing stress and possible harmful reactions. Like our own hearing 70db should be approaching a maximum under sustained or frequent circumstances. Large bore firearm's can reach 160 to 175 db or more. Hearing loss in a horse isn't something I'd want if I had to rely on them. Even though hearing protection for horses is readily available, I doubt many use it.

Phil

Yeah, you'd know that, for sure, LW!

Hope you are doing well there. Think of you often, as we have been down some of the same roads... with both grins and losses.

Yeah, some of the best received scenes, and memorable ones, in the western movies are nothing more than a figment of some movie director's imagination.