Once you start riding a new horse in Red Dead Redemption, you start bonding with it. The bonding stat develops slowly by riding or leading your horse and is sped up if you pet it while riding by pressing L3 and when you pat the animal using L2 and Square when you stand next to it.

Reaching a new level of Horse Bonding unlocks the aforementioned “dressage moves”.

Of course, in real life, teaching a horse (or any animal for that matter) specific moves is a matter of practicing them with a lot of positive reinforcement, not one of petting them enough. But in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2, where these unlocking these moves are intended as positive reinforcement for the player to reward them for treating their horse kindly, I won’t complain about this simplification.

I will also add that even with a well trained horse, executing an advanced dressage lesson well is a more complex movement on the rider’s part than pressing a button, but that too is a very understandable change.

Rearing

The first special move you unlock with your horse is rearing on command, which is a bit ironic, since it’s probably both the most useless of the extra moves and the one that requires the most training in real life.

Real horses can be taught to rear: It is a process that starts with the smallest hops and takes a while to learn, and from what I gather, it is not a trick you’d ever want to teach a horse that is not otherwise completely stable, because you don’t want to risk the horse starting to rear in situations where you’re not explicitly asking for it. As with many horse-related things, you can harm your horse (or yourself) if you do it wrong.