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I taught my Great Danes to run on my human treadmill so they can exercise in bad weather. Dog treadmills are $1200+. My human treadmill was $250 and I used it for me before I trained them to use it.
It doesn't appear to be belt driven - looks to me like it's manually driven by the speed of the horse. He's doing a pretty even, slow pace and he does have a "fence" around him and his human is close-by if something happens. It looks to be a foot or two off the ground - horses can and do jump higher than that if need be. He looks like he's used to doing this sort of thing, and while I don't think we're used to seeing horses used for laborers here - years ago that's about all they had.
We had horses all the time when I was growing up. We had a "walker" which consisted of a circular wheel (kind of like a big open turnstyle) that had about 4 or 6 spokes on it. Each spike had a pair of chains hanging off of it. The spokes were about 8-10 feet apart. We had Tennessee Walkers and we trained them every day - and they would work up quite a sweat. We usually gave them a bath or a rinsing off or at a minimum a good scraping with the sweat scraper - then took them out and hooked their halter to the chains on the spoke of the walker (one on each side of the head). The horses would walk in the circle very slowly and it would cool them down - kind of like a runner stretching and winding down after a run. The area where the walker was constructed was always kept covered in sawdust so that the ground was cushioned for them - they weren't walking around on hard packed clay. The idea was to give them a chance to unwind. Sometimes, I would prefer to just attach a lead strap to the halter and walk with them myself so I could pat on them and talk to them. Horses are wonderful, intelligent, and beautiful animals. I don't think the one in this video is being mistreated at all, IMHO.
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