What was Ray Hunt's view on the horse's dignity?

Ray Hunt's view on the horse's dignity was central to his horsemanship philosophy and to his conviction that force-based training was not simply ineffective but fundamentally wrong in its disregard for what the horse actually was. Hunt believed that horses had an inherent dignity — a quality of being that deserved respect rather than simply management — and that the horseman's obligation was to work in a way that honored that dignity rather than overriding it in the interest of producing a trained horse by whatever means necessary. This conviction was inseparable from his horsemanship in practice: the concern for the horse's understanding, the attention to the horse's emotional state, the insistence on earning cooperation rather than coercing compliance — all of these were expressions of the same belief that the horse mattered as a being rather than simply as an animal to be trained for human use. Hunt's phrase horses are never wrong — which became the title of one of his books — reflected this view: the horse was always doing its best to make sense of and respond to the situation it found itself in, and apparent misbehavior was never the horse's failure but always the human's failure to present the situation clearly enough for the horse to respond correctly. This was not a sentimental or anthropomorphizing view of horses but a philosophically grounded commitment to taking seriously what horses actually are and what they deserve in their interactions with humans. Hunt described witnessing force-based training as physically painful to watch, not because he was squeamish about pressure or discomfort in training but because the specific quality of disregard for the horse's experience that force-based training represented conflicted with his most basic convictions about what horsemanship was for.