0 emissions
FYI: Horses fart and methane is a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.
I’m also intrigued by the “costs $1000 and $750/year to maintain” claim, as the horse people I know spend closer to 20x that.
Humans also fart methane, is that a reason not to ride them?
If your ride consents to that, just pug the hole.
No.
they um also breathe
$750 a year to maintain health
Lol
$750/month if you have to stable it.
750 a year? Wtf is this retard smoking. Cost for land, hay storage, water, vet, and farrier. Human time cost to feed them twice a day, get rid of or spread the shit. Blanket, saddle, bridle. You’re looking at a few thousand a year minus the time sink.
This article says 8 to 11k yearly. https://horserookie.com/average-horse-cost-by-state/
While cost of owning a car is between 3k and 9k yearly according to https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/.
I would have thought that a horse would be much more expensive, like 10 times a car cost.
Interesting, I recall a colleague in UK mention that it was costing her up to 20k a year. That was her max but not always/everywhere - would have been almost 30k USD at the time, so it sounds considerably cheaper in US but obviously a lot more land available and affordable
I also had a colleague in the UK casually talking in the break room if she should buy a house or a horse because they were comparatively expensive.
He said to keep it alive, nit to actually care for it in any meaningful way.
Even completely throwing morality out the window, just keeping a horse in functional condition so that it can be ridden to places would still require quite a bit more than that.
Yep. Once upon a time, you had to be very wealthy to own a car.
Now it’s horses.
I doubt that owning horses has ever been cheap either.
Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren’t that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.
- Feeding them probably wasn’t too expensive if you had a place they could just graze. Even if you didn’t own a farm, there were probably still wild / common areas where animals could graze.
- Shoeing / vet care probably wasn’t as expensive when horses were the main means of transportation, so vets and smiths were everywhere
- In a rural area, you probably already had a barn / stable / shack that you could use to provide the horse with shelter, so it didn’t need its own additional building. If you did need to build a structure, land was cheap and so it was only the cost of labor you had to worry about.
- Cleaning out the horse poop was a chore, but it could be used as fertilizer, so it wasn’t just something you had to dispose of
- You’d still need saddles, stirrups, reins, etc. But, that was made from leather and metal and would probably last decades with some basic maintenance
- Since horses were, ahem, workhorses, not race horses or display horses, they were probably bred to be sturdier and not as prone to requiring medicine or frequent vet trips
It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.
I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.
I don’t think the horse pill means what anon thinks it means…
Joe Rogan ruined horsepill posts
Where is this guy getting a horse for $1,000 from?
I mean if you want any old horse and can transport it you can often get them for free. They’re like pianos
you can often get them for free
The maintenance cost of a “free” horse is anything but
Oh I’m not discounting that. Free pianos don’t tend to be cheap either to get tuned, and that’s if you can even tune them in the first place.
does a horse not transport itself ?
Not in a way amenable to seal the deal a few cities across, unless you get a one way ride up there and you’re prepared to camp/hotel a few nights on the way back
You will get an OWI if you ride a horse drunk.
Source: I know a guy who trained his horse to ride from the bar to his house on its own. Cops still pulled him over because he was sleeping on the horse.
I’m pretty sure it depends on the state and whether or not that state considers a horse to be a vehicle/device. Alabama, for example, I believe does not consider a horse to be either, while I think California does. There’s this story that sometimes gets submitted to TIL-type communities where a man from Louisiana was decided to be ineligible for a DUI charge after doing exactly that, but he was still given a court summons for “disturbing the peace by intoxication”.
Dumbest shit ever. I literally have a designated driver under me!
Zero emissions? I know people find it ha ha funny, but farts legitimately contain methane and other green house gassses.
Cows for example are a large contributor of GHG
plus if we had as many horses as we did cars we would be living in a horse shit apocalypse.
Compress into brick, then build tower. Now you also have tower.
This is complete bs.
Tldr: cows in sheds eating corn is the problem, cows eating natural grass actually sequester more carbon than an empty field.
Long answer: Photosynthesis can only get carbon from the atmosphere. This carbon is then turned into plant material in grass. This grass is then eaten by the cow. A small portion of this grass will be converted into methane and other byproducts in the cow’s digestive tracks. Some will be turned to energy for the cow and a vast majority will be shit out as raw unprocessed material. This raw unprocessed material, i.e. cow shit, this will last in the environment sequestering more carbon for longer time than just grass sitting there by itself. A grazed paddock will grow more grass than a non-grazed paddock because the cows are eating the fucking grass. i.e. more carbon from the environment is getting sequestered in the grass and the cow shit.
The only reason that cows get such a bad wrap is that variouse other factors are being counted that really shouldnt be under cows. Deforestation to grow plants to feed livestock, the transportation of meat, livestock feed etc etc.
A properly managed grass fed beef (like what we have here in australia) actually has a net negative effect on ghg. The factory farmed beef eating corn in a shed thats never seen a blade of grass is whats actually causing the ghg seen in the reports.
We have already seen this narrarive been used to strongarm small farmers grazing cattle while the multinational farms get away with fucking the environment cos they can afford the cost of beurocracy.
We are all just 3 warm meals away from anarchy thats something we should do well to remember.
Ps. Its not “cow flatulence” its “enteric fermentation” (burps) cow farts just makes a better headline.
Edit: formatting
tract
rap
various
I can’t believe my eyes, someone that isn’t spouting the usual bullshit about cows and GHG on Lemmy.
I’ll be gobsmacked.
What constitutes reliable is a matter of opinion I suppose, but the first concrete statement of fact:
0 emissions
Wrong, right out of the gate.
That is a shockingly cheap horse.
Ignoring lack of parking, slow travel and waste disposal, it’s more like 3-6k if you already live on a farm. 5-10k if you board it with someone, and you’ll likely need a car to get you to the stables.
A bicycle however…
US government will let you adopt a horse or mule per year for super cheap as long as you can care for them and can pick them up
My wife and I are considering a mule for tasks around our acre and it’s less than getting most other animals
That’s all well and good, but I’ve spent years around horses and owners…long enough to know that I’d never want one, at least not one you’d actually intend to use for any sort of riding if I had a choice.
Animals that can be cranky, bite, kick, needs farriers, training, vet bills, meds, food, tack, trailer, shelter, stable, or barn, land to keep the horse healthy and not too confined, constant work for cleanup mucking stalls…
Every tike you want to go somewhere you hope the horse is agreeable, feet are ok, saddle it up when it maybe doesn’t want to go, get there at a leisurely walk (can’t gallop or trot the whole time), bring food and hope there’s water for the animal….etc. etc.
$1750 is not horse money. Not by a long shot. Not in the context of this hypothetical argument where one might trade a horse for a car. How many bags of groceries does one bring home on a horse? Oh, now we have to buy a wagon?
There’s a reason people traded these magical animals for cars.
I’m just here to appreciate horseface gigachad, nei-ei-ei-ei-eighhhhh 😆
These prices are ridiculously incorrect, but we can dream and strive to build a horsepilled world.
My in-laws have some horses on their little hobby farm. They grow and bale their own hay which gives them an excuse to play with their antique tractors and makes it affordable enough to keep the “hay burners” around. I agree the prices anon provides are pretty rediculously low
Faster travel > everything else
trebuchet > car
From what little I know about horses, almost all your time is spent trying to make sure they don’t kill themselves. I can leave my vechile outside in the cold for weeks at a time and not have to think about it.
Gotta get a work horse!
The lowest emission vehicle you can own is an electric bike.*
Will cost 1–4k and way less than $750 annually in maintenance. Can get a road-only one or one capable of going off-road. Does not require insurance or licensing. Can’t legally drink and ride, but you’re very unlikely to get caught if you do, and unlike drink driving the risk is overwhelmingly only to yourself.
Keeps you fit and healthy by being active in your daily life.
* yes, lower even than an analogue bike, because the electric motor is more carbon efficient than human muscle power which requires eating more.
yes, lower even than an analogue bike, because the electric motor is more carbon efficient than human muscle power which requires eating more.
Everytime I saw this claim, it ended up being bullshit. What’s your source?
It’s been a while, but I believe this video was where I heard it. From memory (I’m out right now and can’t rewatch to verify) it was specifically the per-kilometre carbon emissions, not taking into account manufacturing costs.
Obviously there’s some fuziness depending on your diet and the power source used for charging. A vegan who would be charging in a coal-powered grid is going to look better, relatively speaking, for an analogue bike than someone who eats multiple kilos of red meat every week who has solar panels.
I’m not vegan, but I largely replaced by cycling calories w/ oats when I biked to work for a few years, and my area is largely powered by coal and natural gas (not sure on the exact ratio). I haven’t done the math, but I’m guessing I would come out ahead of an electric bike, especially if we included manufacturing and shipping costs for the motor and battery.
You are the horse.
I’ll take that as a compliment.
