Faced with climate breakdown and the energy crisis there is a growing movement in French towns to bring back the horse and cart as an alternative to fossil fuels. The number of towns and urban areas using them continues to rise. Frequent tasks are rubbish collection and taking children to school

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  4. *In the southern town of Vendargues, where the horse-drawn school carts are so popular that waiting lists have been 100 families-long, a study found they had improved the children’s relationship to learning. Some children who could walk or cycle to school preferred travelling by horse-drawn cart, despite it taking longer, because they found it “calming”.*

    *Municipal draft horses have also been used for the maintenance of green spaces, public transport to markets, local forestry work and collecting Christmas trees for recycling. Most towns using draft-horses are middle-sized, with many across northern France. In parallel, there has been an increase in the agricultural use of horses and donkeys, with hundreds currently used in vineyards and for market gardening.*

    *Attitudes towards rubbish collection have changed, with local residents setting apart their glass bottles to make it easier for the horse-drawn workers. “I’m not sure they would do the same for a bin lorry,” Perlade said.*

    *“We feel that we’re building the famous post-covid world,” said André Hartereau, a former mayor now involved in the local authority’s running of Hennebont’s national stud farm. Horses could neither provide all the answers to the emissions problem, nor replace all vehicles, he said, “but what we can do is considerable … A horse has no carbon imprint on the environment, it’s not a ruminant like a cow. Costs can be lower than investing in motorised transport.”*

    *Bernadette Lizet, an ethnologist and historian of draft horses, said their return to the urban landscape was rooted in growing global concern to protect biodiversity. Draft horses remain popular with the public, because “they still represent a link between generations”, said Lizet. “Horses disappeared from farming life in France relatively recently, it’s the 60s, 70s, even 80s. Their presence represents a connection between old and young.”*

  8. In the late 19th century, one popular doomsday scenario in large cities was crazy traffic with horse carriages and horses pooping so much that it would cause unheard levels of pollution. The problem seemed unsolvable.

    Then, the car was invented.

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