Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly. This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *li

Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly. This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread > According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day. Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then. It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were. Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?. Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop). ------------ Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead. Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained. The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.