Horses today yes. They are built incredibly efficient compared to yesterday's horses. Better ligament material, lighter and stronger bones, not to mention the carbon muscle fibers.
This but unironically, horses are constantly being bred to be bigger. The reason people rode chariots in Greece is because horses were too small to ride horseback.
Say, I'm not really a horse guy, but my dad says my mustang needs more blinker fluid. Well the guy at the stable sold me some, but now where do I put it?
Horses today yes. They are built incredibly efficient compared to yesterday’s horses. Better ligament material, lighter and stronger bones, not to mention the carbon muscle fibers.
and i thought horses used to be toeing the line between fucking exploding and run fast hee hee hoo hoo
Citing measurements made at the 1926 Iowa State Fair, they reported that the peak power over a few seconds has been measured to be as high as 14.88 hp (11.10 kW) and also observed that for sustained activity, a work rate of about 1 hp (0.75 kW) per horse is consistent with agricultural advice from both the 19th and 20th centuries [...]
Sounds to me like the 1 hp unit is fair, after all.
thats not a sustainable amount of horsepower for a horse, but it is for an engine. Notably engines are better at moving heavy loads for longer and uphill. The name is misleading though. It should be like "sustained horsepower"
Wikipedia: "Two common definitions used today are the imperial horsepower, which is about 745.7 watts, and the metric horsepower, which is approximately 735.5 watts."
Oh fuck!
The name is misleading though, it should be like "non-systemic unit of power" or "non-SI unit of power".
I wouldn't be surprised to discover horses are better cared for now than when the coin was termed. We just understand nutrition better these days for both humans and animals. And we don't beat our animals like they did back then either.
There's evidence that knights would dismount before battle to prevent their horse from being injured, even though they knew they were exposing themselves to greater risk. Although we have more technical knowledge about how to "optimally" care for horses now, there's no reason to believe that we aren't as or more exploitative of them, rendering them as or less healthy than horses back then.