Logging with horses and mules

[cmac2012]

Suddenly my tiny yearning to harvest timber using draft horses and mules has sprung to life again. It's more possible to selectively log with horses than with skidders. Requires less road building. Not that I've done it.

I have a friends in Eastern WA who have used Belgians and other large equines to log for about 25 years. The last time I saw one of them, mid 90s, he had a pair of Clydesdale mules. First and probably only time I've seen draft mules in the flesh.

Found this pic of two Suffolk mules on either side of two Suffolk horses:



Formal name, Suffolk Punch, this English breed almost disappeared in the mid 20th century, is now being revived. Here's a Suffolk stallion:



THE USE OF DRAFT ANIMALS TO SKID LOGS:
A FACT SHEET

Logging with draft animals is practical, efficient, and environmentally-sound, used on about 75% of all logging jobs in Appalachia.

A horse weighs about 1,600 pounds; a rubber-tired skidder weighs about 10,000 pounds.

A horse can be maintained for 1 year for less than it costs to buy one skidder tire.

A trained logging horse costs $1,500-$2,000 and can work for 15-20 years.

A logger and a team of horses can be hired for skidding timber for $125-$175 per day.

Horses and mules can do about the same amount of work.

Horses and mules eat about the same amount of food: 3-4 gallons (equivalent to $5-8) of feed per day.

Mules are more tolerant of hot weather than horses.

A single horse may be used to skid low-density trees like red cedar; a team of horses is needed to skid high-density trees like oak.

Horses can skid logs up or down slopes.

The maximum practical skidding distance for horses is about 1/4 mile (about 1500 feet).

A team of horses can pull a load of about 150-200 board-feet; this is equivalent to a green weight of about 1,500 pounds; to a white oak log 20-inches DBH and 24 feet long; or to two white oak logs 15-inches DBH and 32 feet long.

A team of horses can skid about 1,800 board-feet (120 logs) of red cedar per day; a pair of horses can skid about 3,000 board-feet of hardwoods per day.

Life expectancies of oxen, horses and mules, respectively, are 10, 20, and 35 years.

Typically, four animals are brought to a logging site and are rotated to give them breaks from working.

Start-up costs (1996) for horse-logging are about less than $10,000; start-up costs for conventional logging are greater than $100,000.