The stables alone for the NYPD’s horses cost $30 million to build and the maintenance of the NYPD horses costs $8 million yearly

Anyway did you know that the New York Public Library is closed on weekends now because of city budget cuts?

Horse people and horse riding is my pet peeve

medieval guy complaining about the mongols

Horse people are on another level. Its like golf people but with more animal abuse.

Well generally the response to horses, scout cavalry, knights, etc is to simply field spearmen/pikemen/halberdiers, which have a massive damage bonus against mounted units and elephants. If you're able to field camels, they're also a cost effective way of dealing with cavalry.

Monks can do the "wololo" convert, but remember that light cavalry resist conversion, but heavy cavalry are quite susceptible.

thank you the whole concept of horse riding is so insanely exploitative and cruel if you think about it for more than a second. I don't understand how anyone could believe their horse is entitled to any rights or care or love and then also ride them lol. to me you'd have to think horses are like robotic soulless creatures to justify such a thing but horse people somehow claim to have bonds with the life they exploit for their own entertainment. I mean yeah if you're the only thing that ever supplies the horse with food they're gonna let you do whatever but you're so clearly exploiting it. It's like people who say they love their cows and have strong bonds with them and then forcefully impregnate them and murder their calves. animal exploitation culture is just so sad

It also gets tied up in this romanticized notion of American frontier settlerism. So you get a lot of people who get horses not because they need them but because it makes them feel like a John Wayne character. Which also leads to a lot of neglected and abused horses because people without the means or will to care for them buy them anyway because muh rugged individualism. Just look at how many horse rescues there are in Texas (in fact, when I started typing “horse rescue” into DuckDuckGo the second suggestion that came up after “horse rescue” was “horse rescue tx”).

What about centaurs?

The brutal part is that horsemanship isn’t just a rich people hobby.

There are so many working class people who pour massive amounts of time and money into their horses (it’s bad to keep just one, they need a herd) and don’t even ride.

Horse people have to have massive cleared land and some kind of shelter for them. They’re always worried about if they have enough hay for the winter and watching the weather for big temperature changes that cause colic.

To get enough hay to last any amount of time, a horse persons gotta own, rent or pay someone with a big truck and trailer and have somewhere to put it. They can’t use legume hay (cow hay) or fermented hay (also for cows). New hay has to be bought weeks in advance so it can be slowly mixed in to prevent colic.

Horse people gotta use special vets who almost always have to make house calls.

If a horse person wants to take their horse somewhere like a better vet office a couple of counties over they gotta have a special trailer, the truck to pull it, the time to get the horse comfortable with it and the psychic energy to fend off a whole new category of final destination thought.

Horses can live 30 years easily. There are limited horse rescues and they have spotty histories because the animals themselves are so expensive to care for and the adoption rate is so low.

Imagine if all the people who adopted heelers or pits when they rented their first house with a fenced yard also couldn’t give their pets up for adoption when they got evicted or had to move for a job or just when the dog became too much for them.

Horses are incredibly smart and sensitive. I’m glad to have known the ones I have and still sad to have seen the ones go that I have.

I know someone who drives (?) a horse carriage in Central Park. Those poor creatures do not belong in a place like Manhattan

I really want to make fun of you for implying that horse shit is a problem for the environment.

Everything else is spot on though. Horse culture is bougie as fuck.

Based on your post and my experiences alone, I'm not convinced horse culture (as with many things) is this problematic outside of 'merica or big money bourgeois contexts.

I'm sure plenty will disagree, and as ever I fear the potential backlash incoming. But I think it's fairly easy (and common here at least) to ethically keep, care for, and ride horses in ways that do not hurt them, utilise poorly treated labour, use swathes of resources, nor prevent poorer people participating.

anti-equestrian-aktion meeting now in session

I used to run into horse people on mountainbike trails and it was insane every single time. The trails were singletrack, very tight, not appropriate for horses, but because they were conveniently nearby for the rich assholes they decided they owned them despite the mountain bikers having spent more than a decade building and maintaining them. The horses absolutely shredded the trail, as bad or worse than dirtbikers poaching trail. Not only that, but if you ran into those motherfuckers they acted like you were inconveniencing them despite them being 100% in the wrong. Twice I ran into those assholes and was told imperiously that I needed to make space because their fucking horse wasn't "comfortable" with people on bicycles. They were TRESPASSING on BICYCLE TRAILS.

Fuck, that still gets me mad.

I grew up in a rural area and would often see horses on country roads. Obviously they would be distressed by cars, so driving past them was a nightmare for everyone involved. They take up so much room on a road. I think horse-riders might be the only people worse than car-drivers on the road, and I fucking hate cars. Horses don't need or want to be on roads at all, if you want them to be able to run around, give them a field. Its such a selfish rich person hobby

I have no opinions on horses. I did enjoy My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Bojack Horseman, though.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I know for a fact that horses are stupider than shit and WILL kill themselves if you don’t take an absurd amount of precautions and adorn them in the right silly accessories so that they don’t scare themselves and fall over dead, and even then at best you can reduce the chances that they will do that, but they’re still absolutely going to.

And what gets to me is how horse people are all like "I love my horses". Like I'm sorry, Brett, but if you loved that animal, you wouldn't put a bit in their mouth and make them carry you around.

There's a great bit by critically-supportable human disaster Doug Stanhope on this [CW: gore, death]

Sorry for the reaction video all other shit got deleted off the internet. But it fits so perfectly and I relate to it so much because I feel you entirely