It seems to me that in times past, up until say, 100 years ago, the horse was a valuable animal for both agriculture and espescially transportation. Armies needed loads of horses for battle. Now that we have our Jaguars and Yugos, the horse as transport is obsolete. So my question is, aren’t there a lot less horses nowadays than before? Anyone got some numbers on this?
this post is a sign that I’m either drinking way too much or way too little.
By a bizarre coincidence I heard the answer to this yesterday on Steve Wright’s show on BBC Radio 2 (UK). He has a section about “Factoids” - which may or may not be accurate.
Anyway, they said yesterday that there were an estimated 75 million horses worldwide.
Russell
Police departments use horses.
Horses are used in certain kinds of “sports” (rodeos, bullfights).
Lord only knows how many race horses there are (thoroughbred, harness).
Some cultures eat horse meat.
And, lots of people keep them as “pets.” OK, maybe “pets” isn’t the right choice of words, but some people simply enjoy having horses around from the time they foal until the time they die, even if they have no plans for racing them, selling them to police departments, eating them, or whatever. There’s a house just down the street from mine with two horses, and they seem to serve no purpose other than serve their owner’s need to be around horses.
But damned if I know if there are fewer horses today than there were back in The Day.
Fewer horses.
Thank you. I was just about to say the same thing. If it is a countable amount, it’s “fewer”
In my state, the state Ag dept. has regularly pointed out that there are far more horses in the state than at any time in the past, even on a per capita basis. They keep drawing attention to this in order to get more funding for programs to rescue mistreated horses as too many people fail to properly care for them and the state ends up stuck with them.
There’s a lot of people out there with the over-idealized dream of retiring to a small farm, raising a few horses, etc. Very few are any good at it. More money than brains.
I’m going to go with fewer, but I have no numbers.
A hundred years ago, there were active cavalry units in every army, every guy bustling around town in a pickup or delivery van, today, would have been using a horse and cart or wagon, all the farmers (even those who plowed with mules or oxen) would probably have had some horses for light loads, most of the medium distance transport would have been horse powered (the Teamsters did not pick their name randomly).
Against this, we have two movements in competition: the increase in population and the increase in an interest in horses for recreation. My father in law, a farrier, saw a huge leap in his business between the 1950s and the 1990s. He even helped rebuild the farrier industry that had begun to die out around WWII. However, an awful lot of his business was pleasure riding and he could not have made a living doing only draft horses (although he was often sought out for his draft horse work). There are still Amish using Belgians and the Budweiser teams with their Clydesdales (and occasional Shires), but there are no fire engines, icemen, or draymen who need those services every day. At the same time, the general increase in our standard of living means that a lot of 14 year old girls who fall in love with the idea of riding can save up and actually buy a horse in their 20s (not to mention the kids whose parents are sufficiently well off to buy them the horse in their teens). Still, with the elimination of cavalry regiments (and light horse artillery) as a basic unit of the army and the loss of all the delivery jobs for horses along with the mechanization of farming, I suspect that our 3 1/2 fold increase in population over the last 100 years has not resulted in an increase in pleasure riding to compensate for the loss of horse usage in daily life.
I’m not sure where ftg lives, but I would guess that it is a state that had few large cities in 1900 (and, perhaps, few farms). I could see Wyoming with more horses in 2004 than 1904. I would guess a similar claim by the New York Ag department would be misleading (if not out-and-out erroneous).
(Real numbers, of course, can overcome my speculation.)
Here you go, real numbers straight from the U.S. Government:
Table 4 – Livestock
Item Number Production Farm price
1900 1999 1900 1999 1900 1999
1,000 mil. lbs $/cwt
Horses/mules 20,004 2,528 NA NA N/A N/A
Granted this doesn’t include horses that are classified as “companion animals” but a drop from 20 million to 2.5 million, not to mention the military, police depts. ,etc. all shifting to motorized transport, would be hard to make up
It all depends, 100 years ago yes people used horses for transport etc, but there were fewer people around then too.
Nowadays horses are used for leisure activities (Riding schools, trekking centres), sports (horse racing, showjumping, eventing etc etc), some police foreces use them for crowd control, so there are still a lot of horses around, just used for different purposes, and as such the breeds/types of horses around now are different. 100 years ago “heavy horses” Shires, Clydesdales etc were the norm, now it’s lighter sports type horses (the type you ride rather than use to pull carts, ploughs etc)
It looks like in 1999 there were 5.32 million horses in the U.S.
link
Also: “In 1867, the rural horse population in America was estimated at nearly eight million, while the number of farm workers was well under seven million.”
1900 is tougher: If the rural horse populatiuon was 8 million, a ball-park estimate should be about 16 million total horses in 1900.
So, an educated guess is that the horse population has declined from 16 to 5.3 million from 1900 to 1999.
kinilou: Could the numbers at the site you found possibly be pounds of meat sold? 5.3 versus 2.5 million head is quite a difference for current figures.
This is slightly misleading. Belgians, Shires, Clydesdales, Percherons, Friesians, and the less well-known breeds such as Brabants were never “the norm.” They were much more prevalent when horses provided the heavy lifting for transportation, but a lot of transportation could (and did) get by with Standardbreds, and the other various trotters and pacers. (You really did not need a Percheron to haul a doctor’s buggy or the mail man, for example, and the big draft horses were too slow for extended runs with a mail carriage/stage coach.)
Today, aside from among the Amish, the draft horses are pretty much “hobby” enterprises, just as hunters, jumpers, dressage, and barrel riders are. (If you know someone who is working their farm with a team–relax. I have met some, as well, but you have to admit that they are pretty rare, even among draft horse owners.)
So the riding horses probably do represent a much larger percentage of the horses in the U.S., today, (although the draft horses are having the last laugh with the popularity of halflingers), but they were probably always the larger of the two general categories of horses.