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Horses By the Numbers
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The part of my brain that can calculate numbers is very small and faulty. But, another part of my brain, given to rapid fire random idea generation, started wondering about the number of horses around the world, and human to horse ratios. To learn about these things requires finding and interpreting statistics. The finding part I like, the interpreting for me is the heavy lifting. But here goes:
When you read livestock statistics, it’s important to remember that it’s difficult to collect data and much of what you see is a reasonable guess, so we’re not looking at incredibly accurate numbers. It just isn’t possible to count each horse, cow or chicken one by one. By the time you finished, some more would have been born, and some would have died, and it doesn’t happen at a conveniently steady rate. For the numbers I’ve included here, I’ve used statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division. To find the statistics, FAO uses official information supplied by the governments of each country and questionnaires. If a country does not supply the information or gives incomplete information, the FAO uses unofficial sources and estimates.
How Many Horses Are There Worldwide?
This estimate is easily found by downloading a spreadsheet of data and using the sum formula. According to the 2014 data from the FAO, there are approximately 64,943,737 horses world wide. Using Webmath to learn how to say that string of digits, that’s sixty four million, nine hundred forty three thousand, seven hundred thirty seven. According to the World Health Organization, there are about 7.4 billion people on the planet. They’re as hard to count as animals, so that’s an approximation too. But currently, there is about 1 horse to every 8,627 humans on the planet. Our numbers are going up. But horse numbers have been going down. In the year 2000, there were 66,677,098 or sixty six million, six hundred seventy seven thousand, ninety eight horses on the planet. That’s a reduction over 14 years of 1,733,361 animals.
What Countries Have the Most and Least Horses?
The country with the greatest number of horses is of course, The United States. There are, according to the FOA, about 10,260,000 horses in the U.S. The population of the U.S. is currently around 323,401,000 people. That is about one horse for every thirty one people! The country with the second most highest number of horses is Mexico with 6,355,000 followed by China with 6,02,9780. The European country with the most horses is Romania with 548,245 horses. France, Canada, Germany and Italy all have between 3,70,000 and 4,10,000 horses each. The countries with the least horses are Grenada with an estimated 35 horses, Guam with 50 and Congo with 75. The country with the lowest officially declared horse population is Suriname, with 156 horses.
Horses live in some pretty harsh environments. For example, on the wintery island of Greenland lives about 150 horses and neighboring Iceland has 74,000. War torn Syria has 16,469 horses. Business Insider lists Mali as one of the poorest countries in the world. This country of miners, farmers and fishers is home to 5,27,970 horses, working as their humans do, tired, hungry and often in ill health. Again, the human horse ratio is about 31 people to one horse. These are more likely to be working animals, rather than the mixture of working, pleasure, retired and feral horses of North America. A combination of factors put Zimbabwe at the top of the list when it comes to miserable places to live, and an estimated 28,000 horses share in the misery.
Tiny, sandy Qatar may be the richest country in the world, but it has only about 6,500 horses. Luxembourg is the second richest, with a human population of just over 500,000 and a horse population of 4,724. One of the smallest countries in the world is Liechtenstein with 62 square miles or 160 km² of land mass. About 300 horses live here. |
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Eliswyn Jumping
Loved this, very interesting.
Loved this, very interesting.
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38 days ago
• 1,863 views
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36 days ago
• 1,830 views
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