The Equestrian Blog

Be warned – Horsetail, Mares Tail or Scouring Rush

Just a quick question... As horse owners we're mostly all familiar with the battle against ragwort and how it has spread into every field, central reservation and grass verge in the country, but how many of us know anything about mares tail?

Horse or Mares Tail, (scientific name Equisetum Palustre), is toxic to horses and should in my opinion be equestrian enemy number one. It looks like it belongs in Jurassic Park and spreads like wildfire. From a few small patches last year my paddock is now covered in it and it looks as if it's spreading fast and here to stay.

I've been researching this plant and what I've discovered doesn't make for pleasant reading.. more at Mares Tail - Toxic To Horses

The Equestrian Olympics & Chinas Green Credentials

Posted by rji | Filed under Equestrian News, General Info

Olympic Horse Manure Management Going Green in Hong Kong

A recent press release is emphasising Chinas green credentials in the work-up to the 2008 Olympics .

The Hong Kong Jockey Club recently demonstrated its manure management program, illustrating one way in which the club will observe the "Green Olympics" theme of the 2008 Olympic Games. Stable waste and manure from the Olympic equestrian venues at Sha Tin and Beas River will be recycled to produce organic fertilizer via an earthworm vermicomposting method.

But does this sit well with the moral majority considering the current and usual state of Chinese pollution levels :

Hong Kong grapples with chronic air pollution, partly from industrial smog blown in from Guangdong, but also from coal-fired power stations. The city's picturesque harbour is now regularly shrouded in a thick smog, particularly during the winter months.

China's coastal waters remain severely polluted and excessive discharge of industrial waste is the main culprit, a government report said. A total of 145,000 square km (55,985 sq miles) of Chinese coastal waters did not meet environmental standards, according to the 2007 China Oceanic Environment Report by the State Oceanic Administration.

Pollution in China has reached worrying heights. Sixteen of the world's 20 most-polluted cities are in China, and pollution from China is reaching the U.S

A village in Shanxi province survives on trucked-in water because underground explosions for coal mining have drained the lakes and wells. The coal keeps electric plants humming, but the mining generates pollution that has left farmers fields toxic.

The density of Chinese pollution has amazed researchers. Hans Friedli, a chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., recalls flying through plumes off the Chinese coast near Shanghai two years ago that contained pollutants in the "highest concentration that I have ever seen from an aircraft, except when I've flown into forest fires."

China has become not just the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction. With one stroke he launched the "backyard furnace" campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters; to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China's trees in a few months. The steel ultimately proved unusable. With another stroke, Mao perpetrated the "Kill the Four Pests" campaign, inducing the mass slaughter of millions of sparrows and a subsequent explosion in the locust population. The destruction of forests led to erosion and the spread of deserts, and the locust resurgence prompted a collapse of the nation's grain crop. The result was history's greatest famine, in which 30 to 50 million Chinese died.

The facts and figures are astonishing, the numbers astounding and the likelihood of change nonexistent.

China will run a well organised Olympic Games. Horses will be well looked after and the whole extravaganza will amaze the televised world.

BUT;

Government estimates state that 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses each year, and health care costs for premature death and disability related to air pollution is estimated at up to 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product.

Four-fifths of the length of China's rivers are too polluted for fish. Half the population—600 or 700 million people drink water contaminated with animal and human waste. The nation annually dumps a billion tons of untreated waste into Asia's longest river, the Yangtze; some scientists fear the river will die within a few years. Drained by cities and factories all over northern China, the Yellow River, whose cataclysmic floods earned it a reputation as the world's most dangerous natural feature, now flows feebly, if at all.

China generates a third of the world's garbage, most of which goes untreated. Meanwhile, roughly 70 percent of the world's discarded computers and electronic equipment ends up in China, where it is scavenged for usable parts and then abandoned, polluting soil and groundwater with toxic metals.

MAYBE;

Recycling some horse-shit is a good start.

Maybe the Chinese People will wake up to the fact that they have to live in it; a little bit quicker than we did in the West. I hear there's now fish in the Glasgow Clyde and in the Thames !!