My life - it's turned to poo

Rachel Wise.

To the outsider looking in, horse riders can look a bit unapproachable.

I mean, they sit up there on their gleaming steeds, looking down their noses at the general population, spying on your bald spot or the grey hairs in your parting.

And then there are the fancy leather boots and the jackets with the shiny buttons, the spurs and for goodness sake who else goes around carrying a whip?

And if the bling-encrusted shiny showy types aren't intimidating enough, then there are the Western riders with the big hats and the swaggering - and the even bigger spurs - and the jumpers with all that galloping about and snorting and knocking stuff over.

But what people just don't realise about us equestrians is that behind the scenes, when everyone else is tucked up in the evening watching telly, or still abed in the morning under their duvets, when no one else is watching - our life is poo.

No, really, it stinks.

Logically, you'd think that the first thing you'd buy when you purchase a horse, is a saddle.

But that's just a trap for young players. We, the initiated, know that the first thing you should buy is a wheelbarrow. Then you might want a shovel.

Because for every hour you spend riding your lovely horse, you will spend another two hours picking up manure. Every day.

Some days you don't even get the luxury of a ride, but you still have to pick up the poo. It's the rules.

The rules say that horses can not and will not eat where they have poo'd. So if you leave the poo, all you end up with is a horse with its nose turned up and its ribs showing. Also - the poo can spread parasites and nobody wants that.

Those fit-looking riders you see with the tanned faces and the toned thighs did not get that way from riding. No, they got their muscles and their leathery visages from spending hours in all weathers shovelling horse manure.

For me, the vicious cycle starts in the summer, when the call comes to say that our hay has been baled and is in the paddock ready to collect. That triggers a flurry of activity because firstly the hayshed is full of other stuff that isn't hay, like bicycles, buckets and the remains of the cat's dead rabbit. That needs to go.

Then we drive for miles into the countryside in the rush to pick up 100 bales of hay, before it rains.

Hay bales are heavy, prickly and I can't lift them above my knees. Bits of hay get everywhere. But eventually the bulk of it ends up in the hayshed.

Then I get to go out and shovel manure for an hour to relax.

In the winter, I get to take all the hay out again, a bit at a time, and carry it through the mud and the frost and the rain at ungodly hours of before work and after work, and divide it between all the horses. It's less heavy in small doses but the hay still gets everywhere. It's especially fun if you are wearing polar fleece. Or wool.

Then, when the horses have eaten the hay and digested the good bits, it comes out the other end and I get to shovel it all up again. The same goes for expensive bags of specially formulated horse feed. Same result. Poo.

Then comes the eternal problem of where to put the poo. The stuff just keeps on coming, the poo mountain in the paddock next door is so large that a family of rabbits have built a warren in it.

I've been forced into desperate measures like vege gardening and putting bags of it outside the gate with a sign saying "horse manure $2 a bag". Then using marketing ploys: changing the sign to make it cute: "Pony poo $2 a bag". Then changing the sign to say "Pony poo - FREE".

The poo still keeps coming.

My horse and ponies create about one wheelbarrow-full morning and night (You start to count these things, to keep yourself amused as you shovel ...) except when they are in the paddock next door, which is further away and has to be accessed through two gates and a ditch, in which case they make an extra effort and create two barrow-loads.

Because that increases the chances of me tipping the full barrow over on the return journey.

There's so much horse manure in the world that there is an industry built around it, marketing poo-picking-up devices guaranteed to make the job easier.

You can get manure forks in metal or plastic in different configurations to suit the surface from which you are forking.

Grass? Sawdust? Straw? There's a fork for you. There are devices like large salad tongs, or resembling a longhandled brush-and-shovel. You can even, for a price, buy a poo vacuum.

So take pity on the poor equestrians, they are not as they seem. But still, don't approach them. They probably smell of poo.