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Dispar, a Breton draft horse, pulls refuse collectors in Hennebont, Brittany. Photograph: Thomas Louapre/The Guardian

Towns say they are not driven by nostalgia as they opt for horsepowered bin collections and school runs

The clip-clop of hooves marked the start of the morning rubbish collection in the Brittany town of Hennebont, as Dispar, a Breton draft horse, pulled a small cart towards the waste bins on a central street.

“This job is so much nicer with an animal,” said Julien, 38, who usually worked emptying bins on to a motorised rubbish-truck in another town but was training in horse-drawn techniques. “People see you differently, they say hello instead of beeping. This is the future, it saves on pollution, petrol and noise. And it makes people smile. Normally, I’d be constantly breathing in exhaust fumes behind my lorry, so this feels much healthier.”

Faced with climate breakdown, the energy crisis, and modern stress levels, there is a growing movement in French towns to bring back the horse and cart as an alternative to fossil fuels and a way to slow down urban life.

Florence, an estate agent in Hennebont, always stepped out of her office to watch the horse-drawn bin cart pass. “When I hear the sound of the hooves it’s just total happiness to me,” she said. “It brings a kind of gentle calm in these frantic times. It brings a bit of poetry into daily life, a reminder that things can be more simple. If I could live in a world without cars, I would.”

Since the first trials to reintroduce draft horses for municipal tasks in the mid-1990s, the number of French towns and urban areas using them has multiplied by almost 20 and continues to rise…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Energy Crisis During the Panic of 1873

December 8, 2020

The Energy Crisis During the Panic of 1873

Humans are not the only species to get viruses. A real energy crisis hit the United States that began in 1872 and expanded into 1873, which contributed to the Panic of 1873. This was a flu virus they called distemper that shut down the US economy by infecting horses. It was in 1872 that the US economy was hit by influenza during the autumn which paralyzed the economy and social life. It was the 19th-century version of an energy crisis even before fossil fuels which these global warming fanatics want to return to. Instead of this influenza infecting people, it was a virus that spread among horses and mules. It began in Canada, and with free trade, it spread into the United States and then down into Central America.

Before fossil fuels, horses provided essential energy to build and operate cities. The steam engine led to the development of trains, but they were limited to long distances. Horses were the backbone of how cities operated just as cars today once filled the streets of major cities. But the equine flu made exposes just how important horses were to modern civilization. When horses became infected, they stopped working and it revealed just how dependent the entire economy was upon horsepower. The distemper, as they called it, spread infecting virtually every horse, and owners did not understand diseases back then and forced their horses to still work and they were dropping dead in the streets.

The influenza first appeared in Canada during late September in horses pastured outside of Toronto. The flu’s symptoms were cough and fever; ears drooping, they staggered and often dropped in the streets from exhaustion…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Replacing diesel tractors with horses or oxen – what will that be like?

April 28, 2019

Replacing diesel tractors with horses or oxen – what will that be like?

Preface. Since fossil fuels are clearly finite, at some point increasing numbers of farmers with diesel vehicles and equipment will want to replace them with horses, which can do the work of six people. Here’s what energy expert Vaclav Smil has to say about that.

***

Vaclav Smil. 2017. Energy and Civilization A History. MIT Press.

During the 1890s a dozen powerful American horses needed some 18 tonnes of oats and corn per year, about 80 times the total of food grain eaten by their master.

Only a few land-rich countries could provide so much feed. Feeding 12 horses would have required about 15 ha of farmland. An average U.S. farm had almost 60 ha of land in 1900, but only one-third of it was cropland. Clearly, even in the United States, only large grain growers could afford to keep a dozen or more working animals; the 1900 average was only three horses per farm.

Even in land-rich agricultures with extraordinary feed production capacities the substitution trend could not have continued much beyond the American achievements of the late 19th century. Heavy gang plows and combines took animal-drawn cultivation to its practical limit. Besides the burden of feeding large numbers of animals used for relatively short periods of field work, much labor had to go into stabling, cleaning, and shoeing the animals. Harnessing and guiding large horse teams were also logistical challenges. There was a clear need for a much more powerful prime mover—and it was soon introduced in the form of internal combustion engines.

The simplest way of transporting loads is to carry them. Where roads were absent people could often do better than animals: their weaker performance was often more than compensated for by flexibility in loading, unloading, moving on narrow paths, and scrambling uphill.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change and the Horse Manure Catastrophe

January 11, 2016

Climate Change and the Horse Manure Catastrophe

One of the reasons of the success of the motor car in replacing horses was that cars didn’t leave solid waste behind. It would take almost a century to understand that the exhaust of motor vehicles is way more toxic and polluting than anything that the rear of a horse could produce. (Above, 1898 car ad).

The success of the Paris climate conference may have been only partial, but it has surely thrown into some disarray the anti-science party. For instance, at the National Review, they haven’t been able to criticize the Paris agreement with anything better than the old canard of “the horse manure catastrophe,” (see here for the origin of the story). Their recent piece on this subject is titled “Why Climate Change Won’t Matter in 20 Years” and it is penned by Josh Gelernter. It contains nothing new, but it is a slick and well-written piece that deserves some attention.

The central argument of the text derives from the horse manure pollution problem in the 19th century. Gelernter cites Michael Crichton and says,

What environmental problems would men in 1900 have predicted for 2000? Where to get enough horses, and what to do with all the manure. “Horse pollution was bad in 1900,” said Crichton. How much worse would someone in 1900 expect it to be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?”

From here, the text goes on listing the many changes that we have seen since that time and arguing that, today, it is impossible to predict what technology will be like in a hundred years from now, and that even 20 years from now climate change will not be a problem anymore.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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