On 7/7/05, Santa Fe Trail Center <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 
> We were having a discussion about horse hair in plaster and it evolved (can
> I use that word?) into the topic of horse hair stuffed mattresses and fabric
> made of horse hair.  Then we wondered, where did all that horse hair come
> from?  I know there were far more horses then than now but that many? 

Actually, I've heard that there are more horses now than there were
100 years ago but then again, there are far more people now than there
were 100 years ago. I'll have to look that up. Plus if you think about
it, even though horses were work animals, relatively few people owned
horses. Most people in the country probably had at least a team of
plow horses but not riding horses. In the cities, the cabbies and the
ultra-rich were the only ones to have horses. So the numbers are
probably much smaller than you'd expect.

> Did
> the U.S. import horse hair from countries that eat horse meat?  I know hair
> can be "harvested" from a horse without the death of the horse but was that
> done frequently?  I have seen coats and quivers made of horse hide with hair
> on it but those can be accounted for by the death of "Old Dobbin" out in the
> pasture.  It's the large scale, commercial use that has us baffled.

I think the big difference now is that few horses got "retired" back
then and they all pretty much got sent to the knacker's once they were
too old to work. Most horses didn't make it to 10 years old because of
the hard work they had to do. Today, horses work well into their 20s
if they are well taken care of. So people went through a lot more
horses back then which meant a constant supply of horse hair and glue.

Deb

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