France The horse and cart makes a slow comeback

The clip-clop of hooves marked the start of the morning rubbish collection in the Brittany town of Hennebont, as Dispar, a Breton draft horse, pulled a small cart towards the waste bins.

“This job is so much nicer with an animal,” said Julien, who usually worked emptying bins on to a motorised rubbish-truck but was training in horse-drawn techniques. “People see you differently, they say hello instead of beeping. This is the future, it saves on pollution, petrol and noise. And it makes people smile.”

Faced with climate breakdown, the energy crisis and modern stress levels, there is a growing movement in French towns to bring back the horse and cart.

Florence, an estate agent in Hennebont, stepped out of her office to watch the horse-drawn bin cart pass. “When I hear the sound of the hooves it’s just

total happiness to me,” she said. “It brings a kind of gentle calm in these frantic times. It brings a bit of poetry into daily life, a reminder that things can be more simple.”

Since the first trials to reintroduce draft horses for municipal tasks in the mid-1990s, the number of French towns

and urban areas using them has multiplied by almost 20. Up to 200 urban areas have used draft horses in recent years. The most frequent tasks are rubbish collection and horse-drawn carriages taking children to school.

In the southern town of Vendargues, where the horse-drawn school carts are so popular that waiting lists have been 100 families-long, a study found they had improved the children’s relationship to learning.

Municipal draft horses have also been used for the maintenance of green spaces, public transport to markets, local forestry work and collecting Christmas trees for recycling.

Local politicians like the symbolism of a horse to show they are acting for the environment. But the use of draft horses remains driven by individual towns, and some figures would like the state to give more centralised backing.

At the start of the 20th century, there was one horse for every five people in France, and draft horses often did perilous work. “It’s absolutely not a return to the past,” said Vanina Deneux-Le Barh, a sociologist at the French Institute for Horses and Riding. “It’s a sustainable development approach, about respecting nature and welfare in new, innovative ways – for example, with electric assistance for horses going up gradients, or with progress in new types of harnessing.”

Hennebont, a town of 15,000 people in Brittany, offers a new training scheme for municipal horses, carriage drivers and local authority workers. Its Breton draft horses, Dispar and Circus, are brothers aged eight and nine who weigh about 900kg each, and live outdoors in a vast paddock with limited work hours. Their plodding pace, at 6-8km/h, includes transporting children from an after-school club, taking shoppers to market, activities at a local care home and collecting rubbish. But much of their time is spent resting.

Morgane Perlade, a carriage driver, coordinates Hennebont’s unique service to employ the horses across all areas of urban life. “The presence of a horse rehumanises a town,” she said.

Attitudes towards rubbish collection have changed, with local residents setting apart their glass bottles to make it easier for the horse-drawn workers. “I’m not sure they would do the same for a bin lorry,” Perlade said.

“A horse has no carbon imprint on the environment, it’s not a ruminant like a cow,” said André Hartereau, a former mayor now involved in the local authority’s running of Hennebont’s national stud farm.

Employing horses in urban settings is also seen as a way to protect France’s nine draft-horse breeds, whose numbers are declining. French draft horses continue to be bred in part for the meat market, including export to countries like Japan, but in France consumption of horse meat is declining.

At the local care home, residents have regular visits from Hennebont’s horses. “Some people here who rarely speak in phrases will say full sentences when speaking to a horse,” said Magali, a care-home coordinator.

Maurice Lechard, a town hall official from nearby Inzinzac-Lochrist, who was observing the horse training, said equine therapy was proven to make people feel better. “Having horses in a town means sprinkling a bit of that across everyday life.”

Donkey work Most towns using draft-horses are middle-sized, with many across northern France. In parallel, there has been an increase in the agricultural use of horses and donkeys, with hundreds currently used in vineyards and for market gardening. Carriage driving, which was once a man’s domain, is increasingly attracting women.