Folk beliefs and practices, have always assigned to animal obedience training the value of virtue and learning, justifying it for a proper coexistence with human animals, within a anthropo-oriented society.

Considering animals as horses and dogs, that more than others have paid the price of such beliefs, easily you will come across a popular symbolism of animal obedience training, then processed and translated into recreational, competitive, even therapeutic practices, carried out in ways that range from the most coercive to the most gentle training, supported by a series of questionable justifications, all that always remain within a philosophy and psychology of domain, moralization, manipulation, coercion not only physical but, even more nowadays, mental.

Always taken for granted, the ethical questioning of animal obedience training represents a new frontier in animal ethics.

Act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.  ~ Erich Fromm