(Almost) Dead Horses in American History (X)
By It’s about time I got back to this and finished it up.
“City Enormities–Every Brute Can Beat His Beast,” New York, 1874
OK, this is not technically yet a dead horse. But it’s probably going to be pretty soon, as this image showing the horrible treatment urban horses received demonstrates. The dead horse problem was huge in American cities. In 1880, New York carted away 15,000 dead horses off the streets, weighing an average of 1300 lbs. This was a huge health and disposal problem in a society woefully
underprepared for the growth of American cities. As late as 1912, Chicago still had 10,000 dead horses to deal with in a society transitioning to the automobile. This didn’t even begin to get to the problem of horse manure in cities without any mandates to horse owners on the collection of the stuff. Each horse created 15-30 lbs of manure a day. In Milwaukee during these years, that was 133 tons of horse manure every day.
So the horse in the American city was a major problem that would not be solved until the 1910s.