Technology for Luddites
“Goats can be excellent pack animals. A good pack goat will carry at least twenty-five percent of his body weight (a two-hundred-pound wether will pack about fifty pounds), will follow you like a dog, will feed himself along the trail and around camp, and will be a pleasure to have around. Goats have been used as a beast of burden in Europe and Asia for thousands of years.”
Read more: 1 (quote) / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5.
Picture found at American Goat.
Related: Pack camels / Pack horses.
Camelphotos.com has an interesting collection of historic camel pictures, showing pack trains, camels pulling wagons, and some camels working in agriculture and industry. Also of interest is a picture gallery of camels in India today.
Portraits of farm animals by Rob MacInnis. Via The Brook (“We are an international animal welfare organisation dedicated to improving the lives of working horses, donkeys and mules in some of the world’s poorest communities”).
Mathew Lippincott sends in this link to a 1991 book on micro-livestock, including currently domesticated and potential future domestication candidates among large mammals, rodents, insects, birds, and lizards: “Micro-livestock: little known small animals with a promising economic future“.
“For a hundred years, from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, Europe and America had cities of at least a million people that ran on a massive, sophisticated network of carriages and streetcars. By 1880, according to historian John H. White, Jr., US cities had 415 horse-drawn railways running, with 18,000 cars on 3,000 miles of track, carrying 1.2 billion passengers a year. Most of these lines continued decades into the age of electricity and coal, simply because the horses worked better than any other option.” Read: Horse-drawn public tranportation. Thanks, Johan. Previously: Bring back the horses.
“An improvement made by Mr. P. K. Dederick, of Albany, N.Y., was a horse-hoisting machine that very materially reduced the labor of the horse in hoisting. Previous to this, the horse walked forward to hoist a full bucket, and was obliged to back to lower the empty bucket into the hold of the vessel. With most horses, this latter was harder work than hoisting the loaded bucket, while the Dederick machine increased the speed of unloading but little, it reduced the labor of the horse about one-half.”
Quoted from: “Coal handling machinery“, C.W.Hunt Company, 1893.
