I know it’s a joke. If I was taking it seriously: I don’t want to spend several hours getting to a job that’s already say, an hour’s commute. And then storing the horse at the job and then several hours back.
Then don’t? Not horses fault.
I remember growing up there was this Amish person who worked at one of the yokel gas stations. They would ride their horse to work and hitch it up for their shift, and then ride it home. It’s doable!
I’m going to park my horse in the office then, good point
That horse must have been bored af tied up to the same spot all day, bet he didn’t have any shelter for inclement weather either.
Although now that I think about it, this was probably a common thing for horses back in the day.
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Yes
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Yes
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False - you can get a DUI on a horse (in some states).
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.
Lexington, KY has a ton of horse hitching posts/ bike rack posts. That may be because they maintain a fairly decent mounted police division.
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.
Faster travel > everything else
We talking bandwidth or latency?
trebuchet > car
Searching trebuchet launch velocities, I’m getting 30-70m/s (67-157mph, 110-250km/hr), so a decently fast car might actually have trebuchets beat here
Cars are limited to roads, trebuchets can go as the crow flies. So unless you literally work in a straight line from your house, the trebuchet probably wins.
Car shits smoke. Horse shits … well … Shit!!
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.
Almost all of those problems are solved by your local park.
Vet costs can be reduced by the skillfull application of healing stones.
horse sick? get a new one
Yeah but horse
Important argument many fail to consider
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.
Logically, any intelligent person who has money problems would have bought a cheaper, used car for probably under $5,000 (though how much under depends on area). The monthly payments for that would be minimal or non-existent. You’d still have to pay for gas and insurance, but those would be relatively small costs comparatively.
Exactly.
I bought my current used car w/ cash, and it cost $10k. Gas in the first year would be something like $800 (45mpg, 10k miles, $3.50/gal for gas), and insurance would add another $500 or so. Let’s add $1-2k for sales tax, registration, and maybe some random things that need fixing, and round up, so we’re at $14k or so, or $1166/month.
I’m married w/ kids, and the USDA says I should be spending a little over $1k/month on food. So even in the first year of owning a car, I’d still probably spend more on food than the car. If I was single, divide that by about 3, so the car would be cheaper than food after 3-4 years.
There’s no way a car is more expensive than food for the average person, assuming a reasonable car and reasonable food consumption.
I doubt that owning horses has ever been cheap either.
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.
That sounds like a huge cost, though less money is used to abstract it.
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.
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.
Indeed. This was obviously written by an anon who knows nothing about horses.
And that’s an optimistic estimate you’re giving. It assumes that your horse doesn’t have any issues that need tending to if you’re not a complete asshole or animal abuser.
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.
That link about car cost is from 2021, pretty sure inflation had a significant impact on that in the last few years too, not to mention car companies getting rid of lower end options for a while now.
Had em in a poverty state 20 years ago 🤷
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.
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…
Except you can’t drink and ride a bike in many areas. I doubt most cops would enforce it though.
I had a friend back in my younger years who got a drinking and driving ticket on his bicycle. Around 1995.
I was drunk and high out of my gourd one night biking home along Bloor Street and got a ticket for speeding lol. This was maybe 2004. I have thankfully matured since then.
Wow, it’s honestly my dream to get a speeding ticket on my bike. I saw my opportunity one day where there was a school zone and a cop, so I pedaled as fast as I could, but still didn’t get pulled over. I even bombed down a hill doing almost double the speed limit, and still no ticket.
I’ll get it one of these days.
If you do promise to be as incredulous as I was when he gave me the ticket. Like man don’t you have better shit to be doing? Let’s ignore the fact he thankfully didn’t see me kicking rear view mirrors a couple of blocks previous because they were parked in the bike lane.
Jesus Christ I was an ornary youth lol
Oh, I absolutely would be. But you can bet I’m framing that ticket the moment I get home.
You can in Germany. I only once fell into some bushes, but since I could not remember that it does not count.
Believe it or not, riding a horse while drunk is also an offense in many places.
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.
Tbf a lot of these issues can be mitigated with good training. But yeah it’s still more work than maintaining a car
Source : gf is a professional horse trainer
I’m reasonably confident that my car cost considerably less than a horse would every year
I’d feel bad about leaving them tied to a tree while I’m at work, so I’d probably just go with a bike which is fueled by snacks and doesn’t even shit!
You even get a wide variety of fuel options for your bicycle. I rode one to work every day for a few years, and my fuel of choice was oatmeal, which is healthy, cheap, and delicious (esp. w/ berries and honey).
Unfortunately, I changed jobs and cycling is no longer practical, but riding a horse is even less practical (can’t really tie them to the parking garage in the city…). Maybe I’ll get an e-bike and get back in the saddle.
The increase in fuel you need for the physical exertion of riding a bike increase your waste output tho.
Yeah, it gets you in shape: Triple bonus!
But there’s also the byproduct of making you swole and potentially making exercise your new hobby, which then further increases your energy consumption and waste output…
a bike which is fueled by snacks and doesn’t even shit!
Well the actual motor that powers the bicycle does shit, though.
Yeah, but I was gonna anyway.
I kinda doubt you are allowed to ride a horse drunk
Depends where you ride, iirc
In the Netherlands you’re just not allowed to participate in traffic while drunk, so technically you’re not even allowed to bike. No one gives a shit about that one though.
The “where” I was referring to was, yes, by jurisdiction, but also roads versus trails, and public vs private property.
Yes, mostly it’s not allowed as either laws include them specifically or bizarrely they are treated as motor vehicles. There are places that don’t mind though. Pretty much everywhere except Montana, in the US, it is illegal to drive a horse and cart drunk. In the UK it’s illegal to be in charge of cattle on a road drunk. Very inclusive.
In North Carolina it’s illegal.
Also the cost of fixing a horse is a new horse
If you do it right, it’s just a knife, some bandage stuff, and a tranquilizer.
Well, plus the bullet.
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.
I’ve never really interacted with them, but from what I’ve read, they have no regard for much of anything.
And why would they
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.
Not sure I want to watch that nature video…
How else to explain this?
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.
Honestly, as long as you have enough horses, you don’t need to wait for them to break in order to eat them, use them for a few years and upgrade to a newer model.
Bikes are pretty simple machines. Even if it rides like shit you can keep it rolling with duct tape, a hammer, and spit. Horses are brittle. Injuries that other animals walk off are a death sentence to them, and even with lesser injuries, it takes time to heal
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?
How many artillery batteries and mortar companies do you expect to see in the post-apocalypse?
Surely they would have had their fill at the start of the apocalypse, no?
Eh, depends on if we go out with a bang or a whimper. I’m betting it’s going to be the latter.
If not, then it’s likely that nukes put a stop to the artilleryfest before it has a chance to really get going. And my point about there being a lot of roads in the world still stands. No military would start to target roads in any meaningful scale when they’re going to save their precious shells for the enemy.
Right, but where are the enemy likely to be? Along major roads and highways. Armies need to move their military equipment somehow, so that’s where you’re likely to see the bombs being used the most. That, and in cities to control the movements of your enemy. I doubt we’d jump straight to nukes, it’s more likely going to be a slog fest with traditional weapons until one of the sides gets desperate (e.g. Russia v Ukraine).
Sure, but the roads the enemy is using are a vast minority of all the roads out there, constrained to certain geographical areas. If one happens to be in the middle of it, they’ll have bigger concerns than whether to invest in a bike or a horse.
If it’s the apocalypse, then everyone will be desperate.
0 emissions
FYI: Horses fart and methane is a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.
Humans also fart methane, is that a reason not to ride them?
No.
If your ride consents to that, just pug the hole.
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.
they um also breathe
Not through the mouth though.
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!
Fuck, that’s depressing.
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.
if you tie it up outside and leave it there and it dies it didn’t kill itself
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 regret I have but one upvote to give.
And, when it’s no longer useful, you can eat your horse.
…Yeah!?
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.
What’s your source?
A bull.
Can’t legally drink and ride
On a scale of 1 to YEEEEE-HAAAAWWWWW, I rate that as a yeeeee-NAAWW.
I don’t think the horse pill means what anon thinks it means…
Joe Rogan ruined horsepill posts
