750 a year? Wtf is this removed 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.
Had em in a poverty state 20 years ago 🤷
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.
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.
horse sick? get a new one
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but horse
Important argument many fail to consider
He said to keep it alive, nit to actually care for it in any meaningful way.
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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.
I generously donate my castle composed entirely out of horse shit to you kind sir.
Only you can solve the housing crisis
Foreever gratefull I am
And it’ll be built like a shit-brick house
We don’t need more Trump towers thx
Yep before the automobile streets were covered in horseshit.
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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
Source on point 2 ?
I, uh, errr, uhhhhh…
Motions vaguely at the four-legged animals
They’re just different, trust me, okay???
Horse is the male, cow is the female. Just like dogs and cats.
White cows make normal milk, brown cows make chocolate milk. That’s just science
And if you’re fancy, you’ll find red cows that make strawberry milk.
I dunno, I’ll have to do my own research on this one, my third cousin’s dog walkers nephew’s barber said he read a tweet declaring they were actually the same animal, just one ate more as a youth and has an accent due to the weight.
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?
Actually, it’s the best kind of correct. But hey, don’t let all that butt hurt bother you. I hear there’s a cream for that.
I love that I agreed with you and you STILL felt aggrieved, lol.
Jokes on you, clown, I’m never butt-hurt, only butt-turned-on!
Disdaining the “technically correct” pedants is freeing, try it sometime, you might like it ;)
Alright, I’ve decided we’re besties now. Good exchange, buddy. Good exchange. :3
Seriously though, I’m smiling.
<3 Based and Horsepilled!
If you think a horse has the environmental impact of an automobile
At what point reading my comment did you come up with this?
Look at how much calories a horse needs per day, and then look at how much CO2 gets emitted to produce said food. Even the amount of CO2 a horse exhales per day is already significant.
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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.
Good shout.
Its a classic case of simple answer to a complex problem that nobody really thinks about cos it sounds vaguely reasonable in a headline.
I can’t believe my eyes, someone that isn’t spouting the usual bullshit about cows and GHG on Lemmy.
I’ll be gobsmacked.
tract
rap
various
Ok, no cow riding.
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.
Not sure I want to watch that nature video…
How else to explain this?
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.
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.
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
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.
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!?
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.
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.
$750 a year to maintain health
Lol
$750/month if you have to stable it.
Yeah, this might be 750 dollars worth of bottom of the barrel, wholesale, oats needed to give the average horse enough calories to survive.
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
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!
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.
The increase in fuel you need for the physical exertion of riding a bike increase your waste output tho.
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…
Yeah, it gets you in shape: Triple bonus!
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.
False - you can get a DUI on a horse (in some states).
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.
OWI?
Operating? While Intoxicated
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”.
In sweden there were some cases where people lost their driving license because they … Walked home drunk so yes it do depends a lot. Guess drunk horse riding there is not legal.
I think you may be talking about endangering traffic, not just walking while drunk.
Nope, just drunk.
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…
Believe it or not, riding a horse while drunk is also an offense in many places.
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.
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 reasonably confident that my car cost considerably less than a horse would every year
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
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
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
I see, guess I didn’t plan all the way through
Don’t blame yourself, they just don’t teach horses in school anymore
Isn’t that the point though. He’s replacing his car with a horse because apparently a horse makes more sense in this guy’s world.
If after buying the horse you have to use a vehicle to transport it, doesn’t that invalidate the argument?
I guess, we’d have to consult with the horse-pilled anon OP if he meant to replace absolutely all driving with horse riding, but I was assuming his take was mostly about day to day trips and not necessarily all trips.
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.
Where the fuck you store it though? A shitty car you can park anywhere, a horse is gonna take some space. Especially for us poor fucks where the temperature drops below freezing for part of the year. Car just maybe not gonna start today, a horse might not start ever again.
Consider horse a room mate. Finally someone to talk to.
Lmao $750 a year 😭
Yeah those prices might have been accurate about a century ago.
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.
Yeah, don’t spend too much time anywhere near a horse and maybe you can think that. You can even ride one for a bit and probably not notice. But as soon as you need to muck out stalls and get a whiff of horse fart right in your face, you’ll change your tune.
