> There were about one million working horses in the UK in 1900 but only 20k by 1914. No one found new jobs for those horses...
That's because most of them were killed on the battlefields of WWI. Here's the source of that part of the Wikipedia article:
The war used horses in great numbers for non-cavalry
purposes. It is estimated that some six million horses
served and substantial numbers of these were killed. By
1914, the British had only 20,000 horses and the United
States was called upon to supply the allied forces with
remounts. In the four years of the war, the United States
exported nearly a million horses to Europe. This seriously
depleted the number of horses in America. When the
American Expeditionary Force entered the war, it took with
it an additional 182,000 horses. Of these, 60,000 were
killed and only a scant 200 were returned to the United
States.
Most of them were killed on the battlefields in the first half-year of the war? Surely this 'slaughter of 980k horses' in a mere 5 months would more prominently noted in our history books?
Indeed, WWI didn't start til August 1914... seems unlikely most of the 980K were killed in the war, more likely attrition/glue factory as they were replaced by cars/tractors.
I just read Storm of Steel -- which is, by the way, The Best First-hand Account of World War One -- and it does seem like you can't go two pages without running into a dead horse.
And from a numbers standpoint, if 6 million died in a 4-year war, it doesn't seem far-fetched that 980k would be killed in 6 months, especially since for an appreciable chunk of the war the Germans hunkered down behind the Siegfried line to conserve forces for a 2-front war.
The first few months of WWI weren't that intense and the full-scale horror was yet to become apparent. At this point it was 'just another war' rather than 'the war to end all wars'. Enough so that at Christmastime the opposing soldiers were giving each other gifts and in one case played a game of football. The battles of losing 20,000+ men in a single day were yet to come.
Actually, the war was every bit as intense in 1914 as it was in 1915-1918. 400,000 casualties at the Battle of the Frontiers. 250,000 casualties at the Battle of Tannenberg. Half a million casualties at the First Battle of the Marne -- which included losing 20,000+ men in a single day.
Remember -- the war in 1914 was a war of movement. Which meant that men were charging across open fields to attack the enemy. The Germans wore leather helmets, the other armies wore cloth caps, and the French wore red trousers. Yet the armies had modern rifles and artillery. This was a deadly combination.
Battles in 1915-1918 racked up higher total casualties, largely because they lasted longer. The Battle of the Somme lasted four months -- because they kept fighting over the same piece of land. Whereas in early 1914, the armies were still fighting a war of movement, so they'd fight in ten different towns, and the casualties would be spread out over ten different battles.
The Christmas Truce was not a question of numbers -- for a lot of men had already been killed or wounded -- but attitudes. The soldiers still felt that their opponents were fighting honorably. Poison gas, the British starvation blockade of Germany, unrestricted submarine warfare -- that would all come later.
if UK horse population went from 1m in 1900 to 20K in 1914, with half the decline being attributable to WWI in 1914, that would mean 490K out of 510K British horses alive at start of war died in those 5 months.
While this is interesting, I don't think starting a war to send older people to is a justifiable solution. Sending the horses to slaughter or to war are different means to the same end.
That's because most of them were killed on the battlefields of WWI. Here's the source of that part of the Wikipedia article:
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110716085011/http://imh.org/leg...