Horse Diapers

The other day, my husband and I were discussing horse diapers. You know, those bags that carriage horses have to wear under their tails to reduce the amount of road apples that cars will have to plow through in touristy neighborhoods.

Yes I know, strange topic of conversation. But after all, I am the world's foremost expert on horse poop (hey we all get to be experts in something).

Anyway my husband wondered if you could engineer a kind of similar diaper for sheep, something that could inject the collected manure with some kind of chemical that would turn it into a fertilizer, then redistribute it on the soil. A perfectly contained system of lawn-mowing and fertilization. That way you could just buy a couple of sheep instead of a lawn mower, and you wouldn't mind your kids playing in the yard even though sheep live there (sheep, who don't produce as much poop as horses but still enough where you would worry your kids might track it in on their shoes).

A brilliant idea, if you ask me. Very green.

He wondered if you could do the same thing with a horse diaper, but of course that idea only works if your carriage horses are pulling carts on the lawn, which isn't really typical. Still, properly composted manure is as good as gold. I hope those many carriage drivers do something constructive with all that diapered manure. Otherwise it's a waste of good poop (not to mention all that embarrassment to the horse who is forced to wear a diaper).

--Becki Bell
For more poopy ideas and horse manure trivia, buy The Little Book of Horse Poop.