Re: Technical and Spiritual Development

From: Peter Stickney (p-stickney_at_Mineshaft.local)
Date: 01/22/05 

Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 15:31:24 -0800

In article <i985v09fmrgp32g9f2unbhrmkbhcbn6eeb@4ax.com>,
        Alan Jones <alanvj@nospam.mchsi.com> writes:
> On 22 Jan 2005 04:37:44 -0800, "William Mook"
> <william.mook@mokindustries.com> wrote:
>
>>A few years back I read in one of Carl Sagan's books a comment about
>>the the shift in feeling towards slavery. In 1800 nearly all civilized
>>people thought nothing of owning slaves. By 1900 nearly all civilized
>>people were apalled at the thought of slavery. What happened? The
>>civil war? No, the civil war was the RESULT of a shift of
>>conciousness, not the effect. This gave Carl the great hope that
>>someday humanity will have a similar shift of conciousness with regard
>>to warfare.
>
> The big change in slavery occurred with the invention of the Ox Yoke.
> Prior to that the Ox had no economic preference over humans as slave
> beasts of burden. Likewise, the industrial revolution, cotton gin,
> steam power, fossil fuel engines, etc. had a huge impact on slavery.
> Today, the world is so densely populated that there is no need to take
> on the burden of slave ownership. Cheap labor is readily available on
> demand, often from foreign nationals.

I beg to differ a bit, here - But Ox Yokes have been around for
centuries - about th same length of time as slavery, in fact. (The
ANcient Egyptians were early adopters)
What you may be thinking of is the Horse Collar. Horses, unlike Oxen
and other bovines, pull with their heads up, rather than head down.
This means that any sort of a haness that you could put into a horse
would constrict theri windpipe, throttling (as it were) their output.
A yoke won't work on a horse, because the design of the forward
"shoulders" is significantly different than that of an Ox.
The padded horsecollar allows the horse to pull with its "shoulders"
with its head up, and without choking itself.
At this point horses began to make economic sense as something other
than a mount for Cavalry. (A horse eats as much as 4-5 men, but
without a horsecollar, can do the work of about 4 men. With a
horsecollar, output reaches 10-12 manpower, and the fact that a horse
is less versatile and more fragile than a human is less of a factor in
the total economic equation. 

-- 
Pete Stickney			
p-stickney@nospam.adelphia.net
Without data, all you have are opinions

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