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
cost of owning a car is between 3k and 9k yearly
Maybe if you drive a fancy new car, but an older, reliable car can be much cheaper. For example, I drive a Toyota Prius that I’ve had for 10 years, and I paid $10k for it (approximately, and cash, so no financing). I’ve driven about 100k miles, spent about $3k on repairs, and have spent about $500/year on insurance. So an estimate for total costs is:
- gas - $7.8k (~45mpg @ $3.5/gallon)
- insurance - $5k
- repairs - $3k
- depreciation - $7k (assuming $3k value if I sold)
- taxes and fees - $2k (~$100/year registration + emissions cost)
- regular maintenance - $500? (I change my own oil, so $20/oil change every 5k miles, plus spark plugs, headlights, etc)
- tires - $1200 (changed them twice for ~$500-600 each time)
Total cost over 10 years is $27000, or about $2.7k/year.
So that $3k/year low end figure is actually a little high for me, and I ended up rounding most of these things up. I’m guessing a cheap EV could come out even cheaper.
So if you’re cheap like me when it comes to cars, owning a horse could be about 10x the cost of a car.
Almost all of those problems are solved by your local park.
Vet costs can be reduced by the skillfull application of healing stones.
Yep. Once upon a time, you had to be very wealthy to own a car.
Now it’s horses.
Cars are still the most significant expense in most people’s lives after shelter and certainly the most significant in terms of cost per actual time used.
I’d say food is a bigger expense for many, depending on how much they drive and whether they’re paying the car off.
If you include all groceries, so pet food, toiletries etc, I’d spend more on groceries than my car most years.
Eh, it probably wasn’t bad back when everyone had them. If you were a farmer, you already had pasture for your horses to graze on, and you could trade some food w/ the local vet for medical bills. Also, since you probably needed multiple, you probably bred them with your neighbors, making replacement cost really low.
He said to keep it alive, nit to actually care for it in any meaningful way.
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.
I generously donate my castle composed entirely out of horse shit to you kind sir.
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
I think you should’ve put TL;DR in the beginning, otherwise it looked like you’re arguing cows don’t fart, when you were actually about net effect.
I never thought about it from this side, but it makes sense, and seems like another way big corporations fuck the world up.
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If you think a horse has the environmental impact of an automobile, I have a bridge to sell you
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Horses aren’t cows
I, uh, errr, uhhhhh…
Motions vaguely at the four-legged animals
They’re just different, trust me, okay???
I mean you’re not wrong but no matter how small an impact it’s still not ZERO emissions, so the guy you’re replying to is technically correct.
Ah yes, good ole technically correct, the weakest and most schlubby shade of correct, whatever would we do without it?
I feel hay and grass may end up more expensive than anon thinks… For grass, you need a big place where your horse can graze. Anon either is such a big landowner or intends to rent such land, but it won’t be cheap. Then the hay for when the horse is kept indoors… Gotta be a lot of hay. And the means of bringing and storing the hay may be of non-negligible price. Then there are vet bills, because horses can get sick or injured…
I knew someone who owned horses long ago. Well, more like someone whose parents owned horses since we were kids. They even had a coach that these horses could pull. But they didn’t use it as a means of transportation unless just doing a simple roundtrip for leisure, and there’s a simple reason for that: You can’t leave your horse for hours on a parking spot. You can tie it up somewhere maybe, but not for a long time, there aren’t many places fit for leaving horses nowadays.
there’s a simple reason for that: You can’t leave your horse for hours on a parking spot. You can tie it up somewhere maybe, but not for a long time, there aren’t many places fit for leaving horses nowadays.
This is why you just need to move somewhere with a significant Amish population first. Like, significant enough that local infrastructure plans around them.
Horses can’t be beat in the post-apocalypse for speed, but for most other things you probably want a donkey or mule. Far sturdier, easier to handle, can eat anything, and has no regard for wolves.
As long as there’s roads or smooth paths left, an ordinary person can do 200 km in a day on a bicycle. A quick search tells me that specifically trained horses can do 160 km in an endurance race. Sure a horse would probably be the fastest in a sprint, but a bicycle has the best travel speed.
All roads are gonna be blocked by defunct cars. If we’re more than 5-10 years into the post-apocalypse, the roads are gonna be a series of craters. Still, a mountain bike will beat a horse in terms of utility. I wonder how the two compare in terms of repair-ability.
Horses self-replicate, which bicycles can’t do. Except maybe in the Netherlands, I think they do breed over there.
I wonder how the two compare in terms of repair-ability.
So long as you have at least two, horses conveniently produce additional horses which makes repair-ability less of an issue. You simply eat the broken horse, if possible.
There’s a lot more roads than there are cars to fill them and the good thing about bikes is that if you can get past an obstacle on foot, you can carry your bike while doing so. Even if the major highways get blocked by the occasional massive pileup that you can’t climb over while carrying your bike, you can always take the smaller road. And where would all the craters come from? How many artillery batteries and mortar companies do you expect to see in the post-apocalypse?
I’ve never really interacted with them, but from what I’ve read, they have no regard for much of anything.
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.
That makes horses relatable. I can’t relate to being a non-sentient bundle of metal and glass and stuff, but I can relate to freezing to death and killing myself.
Horses win.
I mean it’s not because they want to die. We’re just talking about an animal that can die if it gets indigestion(the most common cause of death in domestic horses is colic). Some biological engineering points when it comes to horses are frankly quite bizarre when you compare them to ruminants.