There is no real link between horses and heatlh
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
Exclusive insights, data, and analysis for financial market experts.
Search
Have an existing account?
Sign In
A major scientific point: Correlation does not imply causation.
Another good example is all that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” stuff. Remember how they drilled that into us as kids, because studies showed how much better kids with breakfast did in school? It turned out to be because kids with a stable home life are much more likely to be eating breakfast than kids in “troubled” families. The kids weren’t dumber because they were hungry, they were distracted because their mom was passed out or beaten the last time they saw her.
It also means you’re likely someone who can afford to spend a lot of time outside doing physical activity. Horseback riding is a form of exercise.
Horse around and find out
Not to perpetuate stereotypes but there is also a proven correlation between women who own horses and level of craziness.
Horses do have cheaper insurance than humans.
Also; taking care of horses is a lot of work and exercise.
One would also get a lot of fresh air taking the horses for gallops.
The amount of things money could buy that arent physical but yeah please tell us how money doesnt buy happiness. 🙄🙄🙄
Xkcd’s comic [“Significant”](https://xkcd.com/882/) is my favorite example of correlation != causation – although it’s more directly addressing the issue of p-hacking.
The idea behind p-hacking is statistical tests are never 100% sure of anything. So they run this test and get an answer of “Well if there was no relationship, there’s only a 3% chance that we would have got more extreme results than we did.”, and for their test they set some threshold on how low that % has to be before they say “there’s probably a relationship there”.
If you run a bunch of those tests, you’re going to get some results that make you say “there’s probably a relationship there” **purely by chance**, because that’s how your rejection threshold is designed – even if there is no relationship.
That’s why repeatability is so important in the sciences. If it’s repeatable, it’s not due to chance. In the case of OP it’s due to a confounding variable that explains both (wealth), so the result should be repeatable, but doesn’t accurately represent the implication in the headline.
Reality: you have no idea about what group of people was studied. I doubt it was “all women in the world” – far more likely a group of women with a similar income/country of living, but some of them owned horses while others don’t.
But now you don’t sound so smart compared to others who you have tried to make look dumb. What a tragedy.
It also implies you’re not too fat to ride a horse
If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.
It’s also exercise and spending time outdoors. You could make the same argument about owning a kayak or a high end bike.
This headline is false. A “link” does not mean one causes the other.
If this factoid is true, there definitely /is/ a link between horses and health.
That link is that having money enables both.
Hank Green’s Razor
Married men live longer!
I grew up around horses (and many dogs) and my family certainly weren’t wealthy. We never had holidays abroad or drove the latest car or anything like that. Our horsey friends weren’t wealthy either.
What you may find is that horsey people are more inclined to lead an outdoor lifestyle with plenty of physical activity. If you compare that to someone who spends much of their freetime either sat on the sofa watching TV or down the pub, it really is no wonder that they’re healthier and so live longer.
So you really can just post whatever you want on this subreddit now huh?
I’m as healthy as a horse!
“Researchers in France said drinking one glass of red wine a day will make you live longer.”
Are you SURE it’s not the socialised healthcare?
You are more likely to have white straight teeth if you own a Ferrari than if you don’t.
Is everyone on this app fucking broke??
Also means they likely leave the house once in a while so not fat and lazy
Ehh my wife grew up pretty poor on a farm and always had horses. They had auctions near where she grew where you could get older horses that were being retired from farms or petting zoo type places for like $100-200.
That being said since the horses she had were always her responsibility. Taking care of them is a ton work that kept her active and exercising a lot
Why would having private health insurance have any effect?
Although in fairness, people who have pets tend to live longer regardless of the species.
Also riding horses is good exercise and they get you out breathing fresh air and exposed to sunlight, both of which correlate to better health and lower rates of depression, which lead to a longer healthier lifespan.
I was thinking it’s probably the same thing with the “one glass of wine a day” thing.
Wait until you hear about the longlivity which comes with private jets and yachts… 🙂 Like Magic
Statistically a majority of men who have celebrated a 50th wedding anniversary have some amount of balding.
Do bald men make better husbands? No. Long marriages and balding are associated with a third factor; aging.
That’s just Hank’s razor
More like if you own a horse, you can’t afford health insurance anymore.
They’re always trying to die and drain all your funds with vet bills.
Though I do believe your heart rate lowers when you spend enough time with them.
Source: am a farrier.
I need to wear my Correlation Is Not Causation t-shirt more often.
One might also argue that women who have horses engage in physical activity as required to maintain horses resulting in greater health benefits, and are less sedentary than the general non-horse owning population.
>There is no real link between horses and heatlh
You haven’t proved that
“I’ve often said there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”
– Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States of America
———————–
[^(this post made by bad dragon gang)](https://np.reddit.com/r/BadDragon/comments/q3cj35/)
I bet he is a professor of logic from the University of science.
Case in point, look at what happened to Sarah Lynn
also if you own a horse youre more likely to be active in taking care of said horse or riding it.
Post this over at r/science and watch heads explode with realizations.