Last night my wife was out to dinner and for once I had control of the TV. Ordinarily, by long established rights and privileges, she watches TV after the News Hour.
She hates the PBS News Hour: It's booorinnng! I refuse to watch commercial news, so the compromise is I get that hour and she has the rest of the night. The TV adjoins the kitchen so she can cook, wash dishes, run the garbage disposal, do anything she can to drown out the News Hour and after that, I leave the room, go down to the basement or up to my room and she watches Blackish, Scandal, some show with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin and we have peace in the house.
But last night, I got to watch my own choice and I chose Channel 22, the Hampton town channel which has the town selectmen or whatever they are called, discussing important plans, projects and issues. I watched fascinated as a woman, Jennifer Hale, from the Dept of Public Works , described the progress of road construction, the replacement of street lights along Rte 1 with LED lighting. She was just so competent; she knew all the details about building roads, allowing for settling, drainage ditches and she must be some kind of engineer. I was mesmerized.
Just about the time things really heated up, my wife returned and immediately started storming around, demanding I relinquish the channel clicker, but just at that moment they got into the question of horse poop on Hampton Beach.
"I'm starting to get a flashback," my wife wailed. "It's PTSD!"
She used to cover town council meetings like this in her first job as a cub reporter for the Springfield Daily News. Sewer installations were her specialty. She is to this day very proud of the fact that H. Mead Alcorn, a big Republican mucky muck, had her bodily ejected from some meeting for asking "impertinent" questions. She was hero for the day back at the newsroom, but she hated that job.
Anyway, it turns out that "the equestrian community" loves riding their horses along Hampton Beach in the off season and there are sometimes as many as 12 horses down there trotting around. The horses, of course, leave behind lots of poop, and some locals have complained to the town selectmen. "After all," one of the selectmen noted, "I get after people who don't clean up after their dogs, and these horses leave a lot bigger poops behind than any dog."
There ensued a spirited, if completely uninformed discussion of the difference between dog and horse poop. One selectman asserted the dog diet is such that it poses a risk to human health but horses eat mostly grass and hay and so their poop is innocuous.
Consulting Professor Google, I could not find substantial evidence to the contrary. It seems, depending on the diet, dog poop may contain parasites or some sort of undesirable bacteria, especially if they have been fed raw meat.
Horses do not eat raw meat.
What nobody said what the risk to human health for either dog or horse poop may not be known but the aesthetics of poop on the beach, beyond seagull poop, is hardly in dispute. On the other hand, during the winter, the only people on the beach are walking animals. Well, maybe not the only people, but the vast majority.
It turns out the Hampton Main Beach and North Beach are state parks and come under state law and there is no state law against horses on the beach, although there has been a law against dogs on the beach, possibly recently amended to allow them after certain hours in the summer, on leash.
The question was referred back to the Hampton state representatives, two of whom were in attendance (SenatorTom Sherman, and Representative Pat Bushwick.) Presumably, they will bring the concerns of local beach walkers back to Concord and we will have some answers about horse poop, horses and the role of the equestrian community, in Hampton.
This morning, my wife noted, the headline about the meeting, written by some cub reporter, was "Hampton Selectmen Meeting Mired in Horse Manure."
But last night, I got to watch my own choice and I chose Channel 22, the Hampton town channel which has the town selectmen or whatever they are called, discussing important plans, projects and issues. I watched fascinated as a woman, Jennifer Hale, from the Dept of Public Works , described the progress of road construction, the replacement of street lights along Rte 1 with LED lighting. She was just so competent; she knew all the details about building roads, allowing for settling, drainage ditches and she must be some kind of engineer. I was mesmerized.
Just about the time things really heated up, my wife returned and immediately started storming around, demanding I relinquish the channel clicker, but just at that moment they got into the question of horse poop on Hampton Beach.
"I'm starting to get a flashback," my wife wailed. "It's PTSD!"
She used to cover town council meetings like this in her first job as a cub reporter for the Springfield Daily News. Sewer installations were her specialty. She is to this day very proud of the fact that H. Mead Alcorn, a big Republican mucky muck, had her bodily ejected from some meeting for asking "impertinent" questions. She was hero for the day back at the newsroom, but she hated that job.
Anyway, it turns out that "the equestrian community" loves riding their horses along Hampton Beach in the off season and there are sometimes as many as 12 horses down there trotting around. The horses, of course, leave behind lots of poop, and some locals have complained to the town selectmen. "After all," one of the selectmen noted, "I get after people who don't clean up after their dogs, and these horses leave a lot bigger poops behind than any dog."
There ensued a spirited, if completely uninformed discussion of the difference between dog and horse poop. One selectman asserted the dog diet is such that it poses a risk to human health but horses eat mostly grass and hay and so their poop is innocuous.
Consulting Professor Google, I could not find substantial evidence to the contrary. It seems, depending on the diet, dog poop may contain parasites or some sort of undesirable bacteria, especially if they have been fed raw meat.
Horses do not eat raw meat.
What nobody said what the risk to human health for either dog or horse poop may not be known but the aesthetics of poop on the beach, beyond seagull poop, is hardly in dispute. On the other hand, during the winter, the only people on the beach are walking animals. Well, maybe not the only people, but the vast majority.
It turns out the Hampton Main Beach and North Beach are state parks and come under state law and there is no state law against horses on the beach, although there has been a law against dogs on the beach, possibly recently amended to allow them after certain hours in the summer, on leash.
The question was referred back to the Hampton state representatives, two of whom were in attendance (SenatorTom Sherman, and Representative Pat Bushwick.) Presumably, they will bring the concerns of local beach walkers back to Concord and we will have some answers about horse poop, horses and the role of the equestrian community, in Hampton.
This morning, my wife noted, the headline about the meeting, written by some cub reporter, was "Hampton Selectmen Meeting Mired in Horse Manure."
We need to rid the beach of horses year round. Filthy and dangerous.
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