by Roxanne Bok
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Scatological Digression
MY NOSE TOLD ME WE WERE FULLY UNDERWAY as an operating horse farm. The barn no longer smelled only like newly sawn wood. It wafted “animal”—scented in that heavy, damp hair way, a fuzzy mammalian body odor. This aroma permeates the raw wood, all our clothes, boots and hair, and is highly specific: horse people immediately register it as a “nose” from a fragrance factory would musk or vanilla. It’s what induced Elliot to once sing out “I love the smell of a barn.” And, so do I. It prompts me to consider my daily life should I have been born a horse, part of the herd snuggled together conserving energy and heat on a cold and snowy plain; or spread out baking in the summer sun, slow-moving with heads nodding heavy; or pack-running through the rain, neighing, bucking and nipping my neighbors’ manes just for fun. It’s a large-animal-in-mass-quantity smell, strong enough to blot out even the most odiferous of us. It stakes its claim in the barn to announce “Make no mistake: we are the big, strong glory of horse.” Back in the city, when I taxi past the carriage hacks along Central Park South, it’s my nose that brings me home to Weatogue Stables.
Part of this olfactory package is of course the waste. What comes out the hind end. Manure. Poop. Shit. Nuggets. Call it what you will, the flecked brown wetness of it splats with impunity on the shavings of the stalls, the grass of the paddocks, the footing of the rings, the rubber mats of the grooming stalls, the concrete of the aisles or the sopping floors of the wash stalls. Anywhere, anytime—riding or reposing, running or stepping. Even the cleanest barn broadcasts this aspect of animal odor, its fresh, tangy high note that relaxes into a mellow earthiness. Manure goes both ways: disgusting in a dirty barn, and almost pleasant in an orderly one. It is set off by its surroundings, like a plain dress enhanced or ruined by accessories.
Horses are herbivores, so their excrement is digested hay, grain and grasses with the occasional carrot, apple, peppermint, banana or clementine (skin and all) thrown in. “Manure” comes from the Middle English “manuren” meaning “to till or cultivate the land” and reflects the virtuous fertilization circle of waste replenishing pastureland. When equines are healthy and eating well they produce a shocking lot of it, and this, Bobbi tells me, is a good thing. Whenever a new horse arrives at the barn, Bobbi reports happily:
“He’s pooping well,” and we appraise the pile, nod and smile.
The statistics are staggering: an average 1,000 pound horse generates 50 pounds of manure each day, thereby producing its own weight in poop every three weeks. That’s 18,000 pounds per year, or 450,000 pounds over the twenty-five year life span of the average horse. Seventy-five percent of it is water that evaporates, but still, that’s impressive output. In the late nineteenth century, New York City boasted 100,000 horses producing about five million pounds, or 2,500 tons of waste each day. “Watch your step” must have been on the lips of every perambulator and boot cleaning a main chore of many a domestic servant. Imagine the lacy hems of those long Victorian skirts!
Bandi likes to dump a load at least once or twice every ride, always taking the time to stop and really enjoy it—so male. Some horses even grunt with satisfaction. When the Bandicoot relieves himself in the indoor ring, on our nice, expensive, carefully waxed, mixed and laid dust-free footing, I face a choice—get off and pick it up, enlist an innocent bystander “would you pleeeease . . . ?,” or carefully avoid steering through it so as not to grind it into the “expensive, carefully waxed, mixed and laid dust-free footing.” Organic matter left in the footing degrades its dust-free properties, requiring an expensive oil reconditioning. The way I steer, Bobbi always races for the pitchfork before I weave around again.
I have learned that horses are better able, or at least more willing, to hold their urine. Manure comes out arbitrarily, but they hoard their water for the stalls. If they’ve been outside, Bobbi’s custom is to lead horses to their stalls for a few minutes before tacking them up in the grooming stall. This works pretty well for organizational purposes. The horse can settle a few minutes, take a drink and eliminate if necessary, and I can sort and arrange my tack in the grooming stall, thereby avoiding abandoning said horse to retrieve my saddle, bridle, hat, grooming tote, etc. A wise blueprint, but it’s my habit to forget something, usually a different item each time. Mostly I miss my hat, but also gloves, chaps, clips to keep my hair out of my face, the crop, the soft brush—it can be anything. Twice I fancied myself complete only to see my sneakers still on my feet. Elliot once rode out to the back field, and trotted even, minus a girth. This item, you’ll remember, is the under-strap that secures the saddle to the horse. “The kid’s got good balance, I’ll say that much,” Bobbi said, shaking her bemused head. Good thing he thought to tighten the non-existent girth before cantering, I thought, picturing a free-floating saddle and Elliot parting ways from Cleo’s bare back.
And then, even when I can pride myself on getting all the accoutrements together and on, I find I have to relieve myself, and so I leave said horse unsupervised in cross ties in the grooming stall and hope Bobbi doesn’t wander by questioning “who left this horse unattended in the grooming stall?” Cross ties sound disarmingly secure but are misnamed. First of all, they don’t cross, but simply attach to either side of the horse’s halter at his mouth. Secondly, they don’t tie but latch and are so rigged that with a good hard pull the careful design will release the panicking horse either to bolt to the feed room for a grain orgy, or, more likely out the door and down the highway to the fresh produce aisle at the Stop-n-Shop. If you’re lucky, he’ll wander off and graze in a pasture until, sheepishly, you retrieve him.
“What happened?” someone will ask.
“I don’t know. I was in the bathroom,” I’d have to reply.
But the main reason you allow your horse the stall is so he or she can have a good long pee sooner rather than later. I’m told horses wait to go in their stall, even if they have been outside all day long. This is crazy, I logically think: I don’t want them wetting my nice new stalls on the clean shavings, and anyway, why would they empty where they sleep and eat? We go to great lengths to “housetrain” most domestic animals so they don’t go inside. I’d like to think the horses would rather not pollute their grazing pasture, but the fact is they’ll poop on it ’til kingdom come. No, Bobbi informs me they prefer not to get their legs wet—kind of like my dog preferring the absorbent Oriental rug to the kitchen linoleum. Likewise, the shavings of the stall receive the urine so nicely as opposed to the frozen or hard ground with its high rebound factor. If you’ve ever peed in the woods, especially as a female, you understand, but a horse can’t squat low to minimize the splatter. Even soft summer grass is not as good as fluffy, thirsty wood shavings; it’s impossible to keep paddock grounds soft and grassy with several thousands of pounds of horse eating most of the grass and hoof-beating down the remainder. And if your eyes have ever popped at the sight of a horse taking a leak, you can imagine how off-putting this would be should it occur in a grooming stall with only a rubber mat and concrete underfoot. Thankfully, this happens only rarely. When it does, the girls moan, complain loudly to the offending horse and hotfoot it for a wheelbarrow-full of shavings to soak it up.
I’ve never seen a horse urinate in either the outdoor or indoor riding rings, surprising, given their footings’ inviting absorbency. Maybe it’s the tight girth that keeps horses sanitary in this regard. Maybe they’re working too hard. And only once I’ve seen one pee while being ridden, out in the field. The rider is instructed to stand in the stirrups to relieve the weight from the horse’s kidneys for better flow. Though I’ve come close to having Bandi defecate on my head while I was bent down obliviously picking away at a hind hoof, he has yet to pee in a grooming stall. Maybe this only occurs when your horse is pissed off at you (excuse the pun) for not feeding him carrots fast enough or because you’ve spared a few affectionate strokes to the neighboring homely-faced gelding that your horse, for no good reason, hates with a p
assion.
Poop in the grooming stall is common however, and though it pours steamy hot and potent as it lands with consecutive thuds on the rubber mat, it’s only a swift shovel and broom away from the hopefully handy muck bucket. One quick, smooth, swinging scoop—that is, if you are talented. Bobbi and the girls are one-tool wonders, but I take several passes with both broom and shovel, smearing it into the mat treads a good bit first.
If you hang around horses any length of time, you must make your peace with dust, hair, urine and manure because all four are omnipresent. A barn is only totally clean for about five minutes if all the horses are out; upon completion of the tidying chores that take hours, it’s already time for the newly dirtied horses to track everything back in, and, you guessed it, have a good long pee in their stalls. If you are a fastidious person, a barn will confound you. Your clothes and hair will all trap the foursome of dust, hair, saliva and the essences of waste just by a walk through. We are all Pigpens at a barn, and dedicated clothes, and a closet if you can spare it, are a must.
The same goes for hands. Most horse handling and grooming is difficult to manage with gloves on, with all those straps and small buckles and hooks. It takes naked dexterity, so gloves are best reserved for the actual riding. That means dust, hair and saliva on your hands at the very least, and probably no small amount of manure. Take hoof picking for example, required before each ride. Bend over at an awkward right angle. Persuade your horse to lift up his foot backwards by running your fingers down the back tendon of his leg, pulling and cajoling until he decides to accommodate you. Hold the hoof tight and high and ignore your screaming lower back, keeping alert for the moment when your horse decides enough is enough and tries to kick at your face only inches away as you diligently dig at the bottom of the hoof to remove the packed in dirt and, you guessed it, compacted manure.
On a good day, the hoof is mercifully clean already, or the manure and dirt release swiftly in one large, satisfying chunk. On a challenging day, the impacted matter sticks like concrete, with little stones embedding up under the edges of the shoe in which case you chip away at slivers the size of toothpicks. Or, it is full of soft, fresh, smelly, still food-pocked manure that streaks your boot seams as it falls out. Repeat entire process three more times. Upright yourself, groan loudly for sympathy, massage your sacroiliac, and simply accept that visible and invisible manure now happily resides all over your palms, deep in the crevices of your cuticles and wedged far under your fingernails where no nail brush can reach. Remember not to scratch your nose, lips or eyes, and take solace in the fact that all barn help seems remarkably robust.
Horses regularly roll in their paddocks and stalls, especially after you have slaved an hour bathing them, and it is common for mud and manure to dry crust onto their bodies. It’s an insulation tactic, both to cool and to warm. Annoyingly to them no doubt, we laboriously brush this dust off, flying it into the air to coat our clothes, hair and lungs, and it is difficult to accomplish a thorough dusting with gloves on. Not to mention the various horse blankets, or “sheets” to contend with, another bare-handed job. These “clothes” keep your horse warm and prevent him sprouting too woolly a coat for indoor riding; winter sweat can chill and sicken. Blankets come in myriad weights, and the wardrobe can expand to include every level of protection from the summer lightweight cooling anti-sweat fly sheet to the total “dustbuster,” a fitted, high-collared suit that makes a horse look like he’s enclosed in a condom or disguised as the Archbishop of Canterbury.
My reliable Dover catalog sports nearly thirty pages of clothing as a testament not only to the power of marketing, but also that perfect blanket-free weather conditions rarely, if ever, occur. There is a combination of outerwear—light-weight, medium-weight, heavy-weight or “Rambo,” fly-sheet, “cooler” or rain sheet—that can keep any horse, from the hirsute to the smooth-as-a-baby’s-bottom completely body-shaved, temperate day and night in the frigid New England winter. The trick is to figure out what is required each hour of our variable climate. The girls are perpetually sticking their hands inside the blankets to feel the body heat of the armless four-leggeds, who can’t tell you “Hey, I’m dying over here,” or shed their own sweaters should they sense a hot flash coming on. In fall and spring considerable time is spent determining the proper blanket formulas for morning, afternoon and night. Consultations are held, second opinions sought. It does my heart good to know my Bandi has a blanket master figuring out his precise layering needs when the thermometer reads eleven below, even before the wind chill, and I am warm and cozy in central heating with a fireplace to add to the atmosphere.
Even though Bobbi assures me horses don’t feel the cold much, and that they suffer more from the heat and pests of summer, I only half believe her. Most humans cotton to warmth and abhor cold. We’d be much more concerned about global cooling than we are about global warming, the latter evoking an extended Caribbean holiday. To contemplate a New England winter getting colder and longer would give us all religion about our wasteful habits and probably induce a voluntary ten percent tithing to develop technologies against it.
So the blanketing makes all horse caregivers feel needed, at least psychologically, and the basic models overlay the horse from the withers, down the sides and over his back end to the bottom or so of the haunches. The blankets Velcro and buckle across the front of the chest, and two straps run crossways under the belly. At the rear end it gets complicated. One strap reaches either side of the blanket under the tail, or two straps reach from the sides of the blanket around the inside of each leg to hooks under the tail. No matter how cleverly you twist and loop and otherwise fancy-knot the straps out of the way of the poop and pee chutes, it is wasted effort. These fastenings are often urine and manure-encrusted and must be unhitched by human, gloveless hands.
The problem compounds with mares in heat. Their legs and any blanket straps bring dried menstrual blood into the mix. Again, even in the cleanest of barns, the horse blankets quickly get disgusting, and you’ll go broke trying to keep enough clean blankets and Tide on hand to satisfy a stickler. Furthermore, these cover-ups are hairy, big and bulky to wash and take forever and a long sunny day to dry. So, the best remedy is to de-hair and wash the blanket on occasion, make peace with the dirt, resist the urge to pluck that annoying horse hair from your tongue, and invest in a cruelly stiff nail brush for the shower. A surgeon’s got nothin’ on me in the scrub-down department.
“Why are your hands so red and raw?” Scott asks.
It defies my reason that no one succumbs to the dreaded, kill me now, twenty-four hour intestinal bug in this germ factory, including my kids who aren’t as careful as you and I might be about the hands to mouth infection highway.
On the whole, however, properly cared for horses appear hygienic to humans, especially their noses and mouths. I have never seen them stick their faces in manure, sniff each other’s butts or lick their genitals dog or cat-style. Their faces are satin sleek, with deep, expressive eyes sprouting long eyelashes and camel-like muzzles that are soft, dry, and, when they lower their heads to greet you, just at the perfect height for nuzzling. While a horse might shy from busy hands flitting about their heads, they often favor a face forward approach to identify people by their individual breath and smell. They rarely drool, unless exposed to moldy clover weed in which case they pour saliva in alarming flows. But this is exceptional; generally their faces invite intimate contact. I have always been affectionate with my animals, kissing and hugging them all the time. I’m not alone. The girls at the barn face-nuzzle their horses regularly and even let them bite off chunks of frosted donut, a half of a ham sandwich, a blueberry muffin top, or share a sip of Vitamin Water straight from the large-mouthed plastic container and go right on finishing it themselves. On their birthdays, Bobbi’s horses receive name-inscribed carrot cakes, each moist slice shared and icing smeared between her and the honored equine.
During one grooming session I was lavishing Bandi a typical how
ya doin’ muzzle smacker and cooing at him about what a handsome boy he is.
“Bandi loves to roll out in the field when we let him out nude,” Bobbi reported.
“That’s for sure,” Meghan agreed, “Especially after we clean him up real good.”
“You should see him roll around in the manure out in his paddock. He gets covered in it, even all over his face. He must balance on his head to get it between his eyes like that, right Meg?”
I pulled my face quickly away from his and searched for evidence.
“You should see him in the morning sometimes. He’s got poop all over his face and ears and head. I don’t know how he manages it.” Meghan shook her head.
“I guess I’ll have to stop smooching him so much.” I wiped my mouth on the arm of my jacket, on which I noticed the crease marks of brown dirt, dust, manure... whatever.
“Well, he usually keeps his nose out of it, so you’re probably safe,” Bobbi laughed.
I thought about Scott’s reprimands regarding dog kissing.
“Do you have to do that?” he’d demand. “It’s really revolting.”
“But look how cute she is,” I’d say and hold Velvet up to his face. “How can Daddy not love you, Velvie? . . . She smells so good. Come on, give her a little peck.”
“I’m not that dog’s father, and you’re not its mother, by the way.” He’d recoil in displeasure. “You’re a real nutter, you know.”
“But she’s so cute. And dogs are very clean—we can’t get their germs. Here, just give her a pat.”
He rolls his eyes and does just that, a perfunctory knock on the head.
Now my affection has multiplied to horses, cats and bunnies. It’s hard for me to understand his aversion; I feel so naturally connected to our pets. But it must be strange for him to have these, to him alien, creatures roaming his house. He has acclimated, but still must physically restrain himself when the kids take my lead. But, there is hope for him: on a trip to Anguilla, as instructed, he kissed a dolphin. We have it documented on the video we bought after our “dolphin experience.”