BY CARTER L. CLEWS, Chairman Emeritus, LaptopAmerica.net
Once while making a speech President Harry S. Truman made the statement that a certain piece of legislation was a “Load of horse manure”. One of his aides leaned over to Mrs. Truman and said, “Try to get him to stop using that term.”
To which, Mrs. Truman replied: “It’s taken me 20 years to get him to start using that term.”
This past Friday, your faithful scribe accompanied a lady friend to a horse farm in Faquier County, Virginia (she rides; I do not). While she was out prancing about, I chanced to ask one of the stable girls how much the average horse “egests” per day.
Pointing to a nearby wheelbarrow filled with horse manure, she replied, “That’s from one day in one stall.” I weighed it. It came to about 40 pounds – which, it turns out, is very near the actual average of 36 pounds of horse manure per horse per day nationwide.
So, let’s just say the Greens have their way, and we are all forced to abandon automobiles and go back to riding horses. Conservatively speaking, each American very likely would have at least one horse. And that totals roughly 300,000,000 horses — each diurnally producing some 36 pounds of Grade A horse manure.
By my figuring, that comes to 10,800,000,000 pounds of horse manure per day (give or take a few pounds for the occasional horse suffering the ill effects of Potomac Horse Fever or abnormal gut microflora).
Now, those who have spent any time whatsoever observing a pile of horse manure would have no doubt that, spread out, it would easily cover one square foot of land. And since there are 28,000,000 square feet in one square mile, that means that should the Greens have their way, each day, we would be inundated with some 385 square miles of horse manure.
Which means that every single day — 365 days a year, decade in and decade out — we would have to find a way to dispose of the amount of horse manure equal to what it would take to cover every single square inch of Manhattan — 16 times over!
Or, to put the problem into a somewhat different perspective: Were it dumped on Al Gore’s massive 20,000 square foot home (boasting 20 rooms and eight bathrooms) in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, Tennessee, it would create a pile of horse manure reaching approximately 540,000 feet into the air.
Which somehow seems entirely appropriate.
