Horses As a Health And Enviornmental Hazard
June 11th, 2008
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I noticed an interesting post recently in the New York Times Blog titled “When Horses Posed A Public Health Hazard.” This topic has come up here before, and it’s an interesting observation because these days there seems to be a pervasive belief that anything “natural” or “organic” is inherently better for the enviornment than anything involving technology or engineering.
This is certainly not the case and many people would likely be shocked by the idea that a city full of cars is actually significantly better for local health and the enviornment than a city full of horses. This is not to say anything against horses in general, they’re certainly good animals to take for a ride in the countryside and many people have come to love their temperament. However, relying on horses as the primary means of transportation, especially in a place with a population density as New York City is presents huge enviornmental problems.
The most obvious problem is that horses produce a lot of manure and this must be cleaned up promptly or it presents a real health hazard. Typically horse manure would be cleaned up quickly in the nicer areas of the city, around the stock exchange or city hall, but for those who lived in less well-kept areas, the streets could be choked with manure, mud, urine and the vermin that come with it. This is not simply unpleasant, but it carries disease and attracts flies which can carry bacteria into homes and onto foods. The manure also posed a real issue for disposal, as it could contaminate the local water supply.
Beyond this, horses consume a great deal of food and water, and supplying this is a logistical challenge, putting more strain on the agricultural system and demanding transportation into cities. This only added more pollution, either by the horses carrying in feed or by the exhaust from railways or shipping. Horses also produce methane, not only by their own digestion but by the decay of the manure. When a horse died, moving the caucus also was problematic and posed health issues – remember, there were tens of thousands of horses in the average city.
Strange as it sounds, environmentally, cars are in many ways much better. The impact of a given automobile is much smaller in terms of what is needed to keep it going and what it produces, and today the number of cars in the average city far exceeds the number of horses once present. If the current population and level of transportation were to be achieved with horses, the ecological aspects of such a number would be disastrous – although it’s doubtful this could ever be practically achieved, even if it were tried!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Good Science, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 11th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
I’ve always liked horses, but I have no illusion about them being some kind of “sustainable” transportation or anything. They take a lot of food and space and care and if it’s just transportation you are after, a car is more reliable and cheaper (even with the cost of gas being what it is). They’re big animals and big consumers and produce a lot of waste.
I don’t think it would be very “green” to put horses back to use for transportation or any other purpose beyond what we have them for now, which is just for the enjoyment of them as animals and riding them.
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June 11th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Yeah it’s like many things where they will tell you the old way was better but it really wasn’t. pollution and enviornment problems are not new. The extent of emissions worldwide may be greater than in the past, but compared to some place like early industrial London or other industrial centers our systems are now actually clean by comparison. You would never be able to extend the old technologies to the levels todays population demands.
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June 11th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Long time lurker here… watched a bbc documentary years ago on the history and effects of the motor car where they dealt with this very problem. Phrase used was ” NY was collapsing under the weight of horse manure”. Also horses were not very well treated and often flogged to death (no pun please). They were left where they died. Another interesting point bought up was that in the appalaction mountains the population was under threat of genetic collapse. There is only so far you can go a-courting in an evening on horseback. The advent of the car suddenly opened up you could attend an event 100 miles away in reasonable time. I think that some people would like to “go back” to the “good old times” never came from there anyway. Thanks I’d rather have my flush loo, hot shower and electric light anytime.
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June 11th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
The other thing that’s forgotten is that the horse owning classes, even at the end were not as broad as the car owning classes are today. Owning a horse was an expensive proposition, well out of the range of the average working Joe.
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June 11th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Most of the working horses would have been hauling wagons of produce and people in coaches. Horses for riding were indeed for the better-off folk.
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June 12th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Finrod said:
Yeah, that’s true as well. Despite the number of horses to keep a city running, most were not so much for riding around but for delivering stuff or hauling things or whatever. Few would have the space to keep a horse for personal transportation, let alone the funds.
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June 12th, 2008 at 1:18 am
They also put considerable strain on the agricultural systems of the time. A friend once informed me that fully one third of agricultural production in the UK during the 19th century went to feeding horses.
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June 12th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Finrod said:
Which, now that I think about it, is still probably a better proposition than devoting croplands to producing more modern biofuels…
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June 12th, 2008 at 2:05 am
Finrod said:
Possibly, but there is a lot more biofuel being made for a lot more cars and trucks driving a lot further and going a lot faster. Still, it goes to show that in both cases “natural” and “bio” are not the best way because the impact is higher in general.
In a way all these ideas have the same flaw in the end. They want energy that is derived from sunlight and sunlight provides the plenty of energy, it’s just all distributed across the whole surface of the earth, so you need tremendous amounts of land for it, to the point where it ends up being more trouble than the return.
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June 13th, 2008 at 1:23 am
DV82XL said:
This seems to me like it’s a recurring theme in what some of the anti-technology, anti-society, anti-consumer forces seem to dislike. I think deep down it burns them, because there’s a class warfare thing going on on some level which claims that consumption is about the rich and that we need to stop the way things are going and stop so much energy use because it’s the rich etc etc.
Now adays (well maybe not now, but a couple years ago), I could get a discount cross-country airline ticket for one hundred bucks and a few hundred credit card points and really anyone who is middleclass can usually fly. 40 years ago? Nah, before the 1980’s it was for the upperclass. Before the 1960’s it was for the filthy rich!
What about cars? At one time only the rich could aford a car. Then by the 1920’s there was the model-T, but still, it was very basic and at most a family had one. Now look, Mom, Dad, Sister and Brother all can have their own car and it’s got A/C, nice seats and everything.
Electricity, air conditioning, cellular phones, laptops – all basically luxury items at one time.
It seems to me like technology is really driven by the current system to be deployed to the mass market, because that’s where the big money is and so there’s really the strongest incentive to REDUCE the class divide.
But that’s just my 2-cents.
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June 15th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Awhile back (in the ’70s), I found a quote from S. I. Hayakawa that described the huge loads of horse manure that had to be removed from New York City on a daily basis in the 1880s and beyond (in 1880, for example, over 3 million pounds of horse manure and 40,000 gallons of horse urine were produced EVERY DAY). It ended “All in all, I’ll take carbon monoxide.”
I heartily agree.
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