Most people think about horses only a few times a year when their favorite race comes up. Let’s take the upcoming Breeders’ Cup as an example. The Breeders’ Cup is a major end-of-the-year horse racing event that takes place in November. This year, it will be held at the Del Mar racetrack in California.
People from all over the world will watch, place bets on safe websites like this one: https://www.twinspires.com/breeders-cup/betting/
and enjoy all of the celebrity cameos and fanfare. Will they think about the thousands of jobs that just one major race can create? Probably not. In this article, we’ll take a look at how horses stimulate local economies all over the world.
Horses as Entertainment
You’ll see soon enough that not all of the ways that horses impact the economy are specific to racing or other entertainment avenues.
However, these are significant sources of revenue because the amount of work involved in training, raising, transporting, and housing horses is so much more extensive than most people realize.
Imagine, if you will, a local track. Though in decline, there are still dozens of race tracks located all over the United States.
And while many of them attract modest crowds throughout the year, they can easily host hundreds of races.
In doing so, they create jobs for the jockeys. Jobs for the trainers. Jobs for horse management teams. Jobs for transportation companies.
Also, hundreds of jobs for people working at the track: bartenders, servers, people working at the betting counter, waiters, and waitresses. An entire microeconomy emerges around a single industry.
For the people in the stands, this hypothetical race track is something to do on a Tuesday. For hundreds of other people, it’s how they pay their electric bill.
Horses as a Keystone Feature of the Travel Economy
It’s also important to keep in mind that tracks and other horse-related entertainment avenues have a reach that extends beyond the property line of where the venue is housed. People will travel from all over the country for horse experiences.
We say “horse experiences” because they don’t necessarily need to be specific to racing. People will go to the Shackleford Banks in North Carolina to get a look at one of the last feral horse herds in the country.
They’ll go to Upstate New York in the Finger Lakes region to explore scenic trails and maybe take in the wine country.
And, yes, they’ll travel to racing venues, both big and small, to place bets and enjoy a little bit of excitement.
Big races like the Kentucky Derby attract hundreds of thousands of people over the course of a single weekend. That’s a dramatic example of the consistent pull horses can have on communities that house them.
Churchill Downs, as an example, still has dozens of other races throughout the year even when the Derby is but a distant memory.
People will come from all over the world to take in a race and a little bit of history in the bargain.
But you don’t need to be one of the most famous tracks on the planet to get in on the tourist dollars. Many people will travel to smaller, local tracks.
When they do, they’re typically not only spending money at the betting counter, they’re also checking into a hotel, going out to eat, maybe doing a little bit of shopping on Main Street.
When lots and lots of people are visiting a community, their tourist dollars have a ripple effect much bigger than the impact of whatever it was that brought them there in the first place.
More than Entertainment
It’s important to understand that there are still many pockets of communities all over the planet where horses are more than just a source of entertainment. Mongolian herders will use them as a primary mode of transportation.
So too will many communities in North and South America. They’re also used in remote regions within the Middle East, Afghanistan, Romania, Argentina, even areas in Mexico where the road infrastructure is questionable or nonexistent.
In these cases, there’s money in the horses, but there’s also practical necessity. They play a key role in shaping the way people experience their communities.
Obviously, it’s a big stretch to say that horses are bigger than ever. In the 21st century, most people experience horsepower from beneath the hood of a car. Nevertheless, there is an immense monetary and cultural value of equines that cannot be underestimated.
In communities all over the world, equines are still making constant contributions to daily life. Some of those contributions are financial. Others, utilitarian. Whatever the case, horses continue to play an important role in modern living.
