Where there are horses there is bound to be horse manure, there’s no avoiding it. One of the first problems I encountered when I started my riding school was disposing of the stuff. My stable was located in a park in the heart of Toronto, and for a time, the mushroom growers on the outskirts of the city were willing to haul the dung away at no charge. That arrangement didn’t last very long, however. The Health Department intervened, demanding that all of the refuse from my barn, and others in the city, be contained in sanitary bins that would be required to be removed and replaced several times a week. It was an expensive proposition and I immediately began to try and figure out a way around it.
I was stumped for quite a while until one day when I was eating my lunch in the kitchen and listening to the TV blaring away in the living room. Johnny Mathis was singing the theme song to the cartoon series “Hercules.” I didn’t mind the song, or the show, but when that annoying little centaur named Newton started screeching “Herc! Herc!’ I couldn’t stand it any more and started down the hall to turn the set off. That’s when it hit me!
I remembered the stories of the trials of Hercules - and in particular the one about his task of cleaning out the massive Augean Stables. As I recalled, it was the fifth task that King Eurystheus had set for him; he was given only one day to muck out an enormous barn. At first the job had seemed impossible, but true to form, Hercules came up with a solution. He bashed holes through opposing walls of the stable, diverted a river to flow through the opening and, Voilà! the poop was gone.
The wheels began to turn immediately. My first thought (immediately dismissed) was that I might make use of the Don River; it flowed by only a few yards from my barn. But, no, I had to be practical, and it wasn’t until I was seated in a location where some of my most inspired thoughts come to me that I came up with the perfect solution. Actually it happened immediately after I flushed and was listening to all that water gurgling down the drain.
My barn had recently been hooked up to the city’s sewer system, so why not create a toilet for the horses too? Yes that was it. It wouldn’t really be a toilet as such, the intense training I would have to put the horses through would make that prohibitive. No, what I had in mind was an immense flushing system that would carry the manure away from behind the horses' stalls and flush it down the city’s drain.
The barn had originally been designed to house dairy cattle and as a consequence had gutters running along behind the stalls. When we converted the space for horses we simply planked them over. As my plan began to develop I realized that these cement flumes could be an important component of the flushing system I was proposing.
My final plan (and I use the term loosely because I never really plan anything I just start doing it and allow it to happen) was to cut access holes into the gutter behind the horses and install a series of high pressure water nozzles to drive the manure out of the barn and into the sewer. The actual feces would not pose a problem, but I knew that the straw I used to bed the horses would probably clog up the system so I didn’t even try to use it. The ideal bedding would have been fine sawdust, but none of that was available, so I decided to try wood chips. I located what I needed in Quebec and had a boxcar load shipped in.
It took me a couple of weeks of tinkering to get ready but finally I had the horses standing in the sweet smelling shavings and all systems were go. I opened the main water valve and the stable men started shovelling the manure into the gutter. Wood chips and dung began flowing toward the entrance to the sewer, where I had placed a battery of super high-pressured nozzles to whisk the slurry on its way. It was working like a charm and in half the time it normally took to muck out the stables we were finished and congratulating ourselves.
We settled in to using the system twice a day and I was so proud and pleased with myself that I went next door to the police stable to try to talk Inspector Johnson into using my invention.
About a week later I was sitting in my kitchen pondering the possibility of patenting my idea when a man in city uniform appeared at my door. He was very polite about it but he informed me that he and his crew were busy trying to unclog a section of sanitary sewer line approximately two miles in length. He said that the offending matter appeared to be horse manure and wood chips and wondered if I knew anything about it. While I remained silent trying to formulate a suitable lie he went on to say that if his crew had not found and relieved the blockage in time, it might have bunged up half the toilets in North York. The evidence was pretty compelling so I decided to ‘fess up and throw myself on his mercy. After a long conversation and a commitment to give free riding lessons to each of his four grandchildren, we were back to shovelling shit... but I heard no more about it.
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