Mounted search and rescue

["irvin lichtenstein" <ilichten1@verizon.net>]

The studies done by most major ag colleges and the Audubon Society show that
horses do either no detectable damage unless we step on somebody or are
beneficial. Penn State got the PA State Ag Department to take on the DEP
over runoff from horse farms and lightened the load but the current
philosophy is to limit generation of possible pollution rather than treat it
downstream. This permits the water company to avoid costs when it takes the
water out of a surface source and makes the farmer pay to keep it out of the
stream in the first place. Is it a valid approach?
In an area where most municipal water is from surface sources (streams,
lakes, rivers) probably a good idea. Maybe we can eventually swim in some of
our streams which are now so polluted with human waste. It is not that
horses are more pathogenic than other sources, it is that like cows they
often are concentrated in one location, but unlike cows they move over large
recreational areas. A cattle or pig farmer builds a containment around their
facility and it catches about everything while a boarding stable can contain
its pastures, paddocks and pile but does not contain the animals. This makes
horses a target.

Personally, I would like to make Canadian geese a target. The county spent
over a million dollars to clean out a lake at a county park, installed
bubblers to increase oxygen levels and six months later closed to area to
all humans due to even higher levels of geese poop. To say nothing of the
airplanes they wreck. The geese moved in to a watershed next to where I
board and the horses stopped drinking the creek water.

Irv Lichtenstein