this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Anon takes the horsepill (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 months ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to c/greentext@sh.itjust.works
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[–] count_dongulus@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] oce@jlai.lu 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] xploit@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He said to keep it alive, nit to actually care for it in any meaningful way.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep. Once upon a time, you had to be very wealthy to own a car.

Now it's horses.

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I doubt that owning horses has ever been cheap either.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

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.