Animal conversions

The use of horsepower is a little outmoded right?

Wrong.

Personally, I appreciate the use of animals to measure the output of our machines. I can't believe you could think otherwise. (I'm disappointed, frankly.)

But it's worth asking, does it allow the level of granularity we need? I recently discoved that a garage-door-opener is 0.5 horsepower. Surely we have smaller animals to measure lower power engines. I did some research and according to my findings: we do.

After several days modelling complex calcluations, I have made some determinations. I propose the following conversions:

1 horse = 5 great danes
1 great dane = 5 sharpfin barracudas
1 sharpfin barracudas = 10 meerkats (or trumpeter swans in England)

So one horsepower would equal the power of 25 sharpfin barracudas or 250 meerkats. I think that sounds reasonable, right?

On the other hand, we have machines that can produce thousands of horsepower. Perhaps we can use some larger animals to fill the gaps here. For example:

4 horses = 1 giraffe
10 giraffes = 1 saltwater crocodile
3 saltwater crocodiles = 1 Pleistocene era ground sloth
15 ground sloths = 1 Sauroposeidon (S)

You get the point. I've tried to keep the conversions as simple as possible for quick calculation. Trying to measure the power of an commercial mineral-boring auger? It's about 105 saltwater crocodiles or 35 Pleistocene era ground sloths.

Your family lawnmower? 443 sharpfin barracudas.

The space shuttle is 37 million horsepower or, more conveniently, 20 555.55 Sauroposeidons.

Now those are numbers I can wrap my head around. Look, it's a good system if you give it a chance. They all laughed at the metric system too.