Hello Pet Vet,
Thanks for your reply. You wrote:
quote:
All the food they would need for water is rain water (they probably had enough).
Probably? How do you know? You sent me to that AIG page for "figures" but there are none regarding my specific question.
I'll ask again. Do
you know the food and water requirements needed to sustain just one horse for a year?
quote:
Actually they would need enough food for 2 horses.
Horses are clean, so it would actually have been 7 horses, but we can do that math later. We can stick with one for now.
quote:
Yes this is a lot but, they had enough room to store a lot of food.
Well, your AiG website describes a vessel with a lot of room, but until we actually do the calculations using the actual figures, we don't know if it would have been enough room or not.
The AiG page certainly doesn't do that. And By the way, One of the books the AiG page references as a source is Woodmorappe's
Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, and I should let you know that it is quite laughable. I own a copy and some of the errors and assumptions he makes are truly astonighing. But, moving on...
I dug up a four year old thread called
Animals on the Ark in which we discussed the specifics of this very issue.
I'd like to refer you to
Message 15 of that thread. In it, I provide some actual numbers. I've cut n pasted below for you:
Let's assume that there were only two horses on the Ark.
Let us also assume that they were of average size and were relatively easy keepers.
Let us ignore the fact that keeping a horse standing still in a small stall for a year would be quite dangerous to it's health, as they need to move around to keep their guts working properly.
Let us also ignore the muscle atrophy and depression and boredome which would also have detrimental effects.
Let us also assume that we would not feed these horses grain, because anyone who feeds horses knows that confining a horse and feeding it lots of grain (high-powered) food is a prescription for life-threatening health problems (colic) and excitability and unruliness. Letting the horse roam on several acres (at least) of land and feeding it hay and grass (low-powered) food generally results in a much more sane, tractable, placid horse.
Now that we have determined that Noah would need to take on a lot of hay to feed these horses, let's see if we can figure out how much these two horses would need.
Well, if we are talking about a sedentary horse, and just wanting to get it to survive, not necessarily keeping it in good weight, I estimate, very conservatively, that you could get away with feeding the horses 15 pounds of hay a day, each. A bale of hay is something like 30 pounds.
This means that Noah, just to feed two horses and no other herbivores on the Ark, would need nearly 11,000 pounds of hay for 365 days.
Of course, this doesn't even account for the fresh water that would have to be stowed on board, as nobody could drink sea water and they couldn't collect enough rain in 40 days and 40 nights to last them the other 325 days.
Horses drink about 6-10 gallons of water a day, so this makes the two horses' minimum fresh water requirements for the year at 4,380 gallons.
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