This was the result of his experience.

He had learnt from it that he might bully and abuse his human dependents with impunity.

As a boy he had also bullied and abused his horses.

But in his eighteenth year he had been savaged by a young horse he had maltreated, and the lesson had stuck in his mind.

It was a simple, obtuse mind, but it had formed the theory that he got more out of human beings, more deference and service, by bullying them and more out of horses by treating them kindly.