Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.
It is said that this cat has learned to walk like a dressage horse during dressage because he lives with the horse. In other words, it’s an example of self-training through observation. This may be true but I’m not sure. When a cat walks, both legs on each side of the cat move in parallel which is unusual but when domestic cats trot, they trot like other mammals. But this is an exaggerated version of a trot and it is as if the cat is doing dressage which may have been copied by observation or it may have been trained by the person who trained the horse.
Certainly, horses and cats often make good friends. We see a lot of it on the internet. It is one of those natural interspecies friendships as there are many barn cats who befriend stabled horses. It is lovely to see.
The domestic cat is very good at learning through observation. It is the way they learn from their mother but to trot in this exaggerated way indicates a very strong influence by a horse over this cat if he or she has learnt through observation. It would imply, to me, that the cat has imprinted upon the horse in the belief that the horse is his mother. I can’t see any other way that this cat would learn to trot like this. The alternative is that the cat has been trained, as mentioned, by the dressage trainer and competitor.
Update May 7, 2022: there is a comment below which tells us that another Bengal cat has learned to trot like a dressage horse but, according to this commenter, this Bengal cat has no connection with horses. It’s a bit of a mystery. I have a feeling now that the Bengal cat in this article was trained specifically to move like that. But we have to speculate. I think there has to have been human intervention because there’s nothing evolutionary which would drive a domestic cat to adopt such a gait.
My Bengal kitten was trotting like a horse also. More exaggerated than this cat. I assumed it was a Bengal trait. But I can not find anything on the internet about it. The only thing I found said it could be a learned trait by watching horses. She is almost four months old. I adopted her from a breeder that lived in a suburban neighborhood with no horses around. Also there are no horse within sight. Wondering how f anyone else has experience this.
I would wantn’t to accuse but….they put chemicals on the horses legs to make them walk the way they do. The chemicals burn the horses legs and it makes the animal keep lifting it’s legs to get away from the pain. Cats love sleeping in the hay in horse stalls. I can see this cat accidentally stepping on the chemical and burning it’s feet which is what me might be seeing or someone cruelly did it to the cat over a time like they did the horse. I’ve seen the video’s… Lots of info in the article with links about Dressage. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/equestrian-sports-dressage-animal-cruelty-horses-banned-from-olympics-1135216