Horse Logging Staging Comeback In UK - 15 Firms, 1,000 Part-Time Workers - Guardian

[hatrack]

Ella, a 16-hand Percheron mare, is pulling a felled piece of wood weighing around a tonne out of dense brambles and woodland near Bosbury, Herefordshire. Her handler, Doug Joiner, chairman of British Horse Loggers, quietly guides her massive footsteps through difficult terrain. "Gee off ... come here," he calls. The commands sound like those at sheepdog trials, and Ella is as responsive as any trained dog. At Joiner's instruction, she steps over logs into thick undergrowth. He guides her, on long reins, with calls and subtle commands into an area of fir trees that is slowly being cleared. Then he attaches a 12ft-long fir trunk to a chain, gives the command, and Ella strides downhill, dragging the enormous trunk as if it were a matchstick. After an hour, they have cleared half a dozen similar-sized trees, ready to be turned into planks.

Ten years ago, it would have been rare to have seen anyone working the woods with horses, but it is becoming more and more common as landowners and foresters learn to appreciate its benefits. The ancient art of horse logging, which dates back 10,000 years, nearly died out during the 1980s as machines took over. By the mid-80s, there were only three full-time horse loggers left in the country.

Today, there are 15 full-time horse loggers in the UK, and up to 1,000 people working part-time. Such is the demand for the skills that a new apprenticeship scheme was launched at the end of last year, backed and partly funded by the Prince of Wales, who has used horse logging on the Duchy estate in Cornwall. Joiner frowns at the idea of using a quad bike or tractor. "Horses don't damage the environment," he says. "This way of working takes more care of a woodland. The aim is that you wouldn't know we had been here except for a few hoof marks and the fact that the trees aren't there."

But it is in environmentally sensitive areas - such as bogs, by streams and in ancient woodland - that logging is really taking off. As Joiner explains: "There are all sorts of delicate ecosystems that need our protection. We have just been working in an area where there were wild daffodils, which are a protected species. Using machines would have decimated them, but using a horse didn't.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/22/horse-power

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Everything is old is new again.....

In NYC they going back to ferries to transport people across the rivers to Manhattan...a system that had been abandoned
with the advent of the bridges and tunnels and cars....