The politics of horse muck

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message.

The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off.

Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse muck out of the fields at the country estate where he has been grazing his two cobs until we can move them to be with my two horses at the new stable yard we have just taken a lease on.

This mania for ‘poo picking’ is all very well if you are talking about paddock maintenance. I’m out there with a shovel every day in the small private paddocks where we now keep my thoroughbred and pony.

But when your horses are turned away in a herd with a dozen others in the vast parkland of an English country house it is a different system. The farmer harrows the fields. The horses are wormed. You cannot feasibly pick up every poo by hand. It has to be mechanically worked in. The fields are rested and rotated.

But the crazy horse-owning women don’t like the look of poo, or rather the dominant mare among them doesn’t.

And so this head of the herd put a statement on the WhatsApp group ordering everyone to turn up with shovels and flasks of coffee on Sunday to poo-pick 50 acres, which is only marginally more reasonable than if she had demanded they polish the blades of grass.

Two customers out of about 15 said they would be there. The rest offered a variety of excuses from ‘working the late shift the night before’ to ‘got to visit my mother’, along with sick relatives, last-minute holidays and urgent business trips abroad.