Horsing Around

I have a lot of colleagues at work who are horsy people. They love riding horses, cleaning up after horses, falling off of horses & anything else remotely involved with horses.

I was chatting with one such equinaphilliac the other day and raised the issue of horse manure on public pavements. ‘Why is it,’ I asked, ‘that it is socially unacceptable for a dog to foul on the pavement & we issues fines to those found doing so. But the same logic does is not extended to the owners of horses’?

A horse can discharge a huge pile of steaming crap on the pavement and the rider will just continue on unconcerned. Why do we not demand that horsy people conform to our rules for canine fouling with equal vigour? Why are riders not expected to carry a supply of bin bags with them at all times in case their charges suddenly foul the public byway?

My colleague laughed at the suggestion and implied that horse manure is incredibly clean and a good fertiliser and that people should be glad that her horse has blessed the ground with it’s smelly bounty.  My solution therefore is that all horse riders carry a small supply of flags on cocktail sticks with them when they ride.

If their animal should foul the footpath, they need not be expected to pick it up and carry it to the next bin. Rather, they can simply place a flag on it indicating that this is valuable free manure which anyone can claim as long as they have a sturdy enough container (and strong enough constitution). There. Problem solved. Horsy people don’t have to clean up after their animals and I am no longer boiling with barely repressed rage at the inequality between canine and equine rights.

My friend took issue with this plan however. She explained that most riders need to use a ‘mounting block’ in order to get onto their horse in the first place. If they had to dismount in order to place tiny flags on the piles of manure created by their beasts then they would be stranded on the ground like a common Johnny.  I suggested that they could solve this by hailing a passing ‘horseless’ pedestrian and commanding them to kneel by their horse so that they could use them as a mounting block. ‘I will bless you peasant by making muddy boot prints on the back of your cheap tee shirt. Come, kneel before me and count your lucky stars that I do not invoke the right of ‘prima nocte’ into the bargain’.

This brings me to my other point . I suspect that people on horseback spark a deep cultural memory in for us in England. For hundreds of years, if you saw someone on horseback you would assume that they were one of your betters. If the horse crapped all over your small holding then fine. At least the rider had not dismounted and beaten you with the flat of their blade for offending them with your course peasant face. You were lucky to be breathing the same air as them and probably their horse was worth more than everything you owned put together. When seeing someone on horseback, the correct (and safest) response was to tug your forelock (or whatever the equivalent was), get out of the way and cower respectfully until they had gone away to whatever important business people on horseback got up to.  Make no eye contact and hopefully they will pass by without ‘making sport’ of you to alleviate their boredom.

I suspect that there is still a little of this peasant memory in most of us which is why we blindly accept that horse riders should never be challenged about filling the highways and byways of merry England with tons of crap.

I saw a sign next to the road the other day it read ‘Horse Manure: last chance before the motorway’. Brilliant!