One thing I always look at in post-apocalyptic literature is how they treat transportation: notably, are people still driving cars and how long can they do so and under what conditions?
Entering our current oil crunch, I think it’s obvious how fragile the ecosystem around cars are, but just letting the car sit unused and untreated for as little as a month can start to introduce\ problems. The idea that you can just pop into a car that’s been abandoned for 3 years, pull the keys out from behind the visor, and start driving is unrealistic.
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Best: The Postman. We’re back to walking and riding horses.
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Good: The Last of Us, Season 1. People walk or ride horses, when our heroes DO find a working truck, it is treated as the jackpot it is–and I think it even had a spare gas tank in the back to maximize distance traveled to harvest gasoline. Realistically, gas as a fuel for fires would be a valuable enough commodity that it would have been scavenged, but they need to do some traveling and high speed dragons are not available in this genre (Reign of Fire aside).
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Worst: Jericho. Nuclear explosions in the US pretty much wreck everything and despite the town of Jericho being completely isolated, people just drive their pickup trucks around all seasons long without comment. Horses and bicycles are maddeningly present but rarely used. I think the show thought American audiences could accept a premise where the federal government collapses after multiple nuclear strikes, but not where people in Kansas got off oil dependency–that would be too out there.
I don’t think horses are common enough to be a common post-apocalyptic beast of burden. Besides, the apocalypse itself would probably cause food scarcity, and feeding the horse would most likely instead turn into eating the horse.
But yes, some elite factions m8ght use them for riding, but I suspect it would be very rare. I think The Postman, despite being an awful movie, has elements of realism, in that Holnists (or whatever the anti-Kevin faction was called) would usetheir power to gain access to horses. Or maybe their founder owned a horse ranch during the apocalypse and that’s why they’re powerful.
Oh yeah, and it’d take many decades to breed more.
There’s some around here, and if the apocalypse came I don’t doubt people would be riding, but it’d be a one per few families thing.
Cattle would probably be the main beast of burden at first.
Being able to ride around on that much meat would be a demonstration of a stable society… but it really does depend on the apocalypse. Apocalypses that kill a large amount of people very quickly will have ample canned food for some time, after which wild animal populations would have rebounded, allowing hunting to be more viable.
And, yeah, you raise a good point… cavalry was as huge factor in military victories throughout history, even overlapping with small arms.
Canned food or not, to project power by riding horses requires that there are actual horses nearby to steal/buy/domesticate. I live in the sticks, and horses are rare even here. You can be as powerful as you want, but you would still not be able to will abhorse into existence.
Rare, but you could find one. The real question is if you could KEEP one, as valuable as it would be.
But some apocalypses are set 20-60 years out. Horse populations double every four years. You could eventually have a large wild population of horses that could be captured and traded through informal networks, plus stable areas that are using and breeding horses for their obvious benefits.
Edit: I could tell the Postman had good bones and could recommend the novel it’s based on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman