LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: WHY THE SHIT OF DOMESTIC HERBIVORES CAN SAVE THE PLANET

I’m hazy about the exact time, but it’s around 2pm and a summer’s afternoon like they used to make. Pulsating sun, sultry, nothing stirring, except for a desultory cabbage white butterfly, nothing sounding except for crickets in the long grass on the lane. The birds, exhausted by breeding, have entered the great summer silence. One bird only sings: a wood pigeon deep in the lime tree, roo-cooing absent-mindedly, soporifically. A countryside so stilled and breathless it seems trapped in a sequence of landscape paintings: Pale Charolais cattle grouped under the parasol of an oak; The field of creamy, heavy-headed wheat awaiting cutting; The Light Sussex hen sprawled in a dust-bath; The hay meadow awaiting the scythe; The horse, nose forwards into the high hedge, submerged in mauve shade. And lastly, a self-portrait, ‘The man about to go ‘poo-picking” in the horse paddock’. Poo-picking is the task in the quotidian agricultural rota that simultaneously irks me most, and I enjoy most. The dislike side of the equation is purely semantics: When did raking up horse dung become the Hyacinth Bouquetish ‘poo-picking’? It is the sort of specimen of a solecism Nancy Mitford would have pricked and collected for Noblesse Oblige and John Betjeman have ridiculed deliciously in ‘How to Get on In Society’:

Please do the poo-picking, Chelsea, ‘Cause I’m feeling a little unnerved, To discover that horses’ Number Twos, Are properly shit, as per the Anglo-Saxon word...

My doggerelly, piss-take jeremiad done, ‘poo-picking’ – for the sadly uninitiated - consists of collecting up equid excrement with a mini-rake and a scoop, the latter being a large, long-handled dust-pan. The purpose of poo-picking is not aesthetical, but medical; it is a way of reducing the horse’s/donkey’s burden of intestinal worms out in the field. Theoretically, equines have discrete dunging-areas, but mine, at least, failed to receive the memo; as Mrs Bouquet would phrase it, ‘He does his business all over the place.’ To say I find the collection of the daily dung fascinating would be an understatement. Pulling a pile of shit into the shovel reveals as many interesting creatures as does scooping a net through a seaside rock pool. Poo-picking and rock-pooling are exactly analogous.