Celebrity horse attack

From The Daily Mail:

A polo player who taught Princes William and Harry has died in a freak accident in Florida after his horse fell on top of him when the animal was hit in the head with a mallet.

Mexican Carlos Gracida, often described as the Queen's favourite player, was a favourite instructor with celebs and royalty, giving lessons to Prince Charles and his sons as well as King Constantine II of Greece and actor Sylvester Stallone.

The 53-year-old dad-of-two won most of the world's major tournaments, including the US Open nine times and the British Open 10 times.

"Horse in M4 crash near Membury Services"

From the BBC:

A number of vehicles were involved in a serious crash on the M4* after cars hit a horse running across the carriageway.

The M4 was briefly closed eastbound between junctions 14, Hungerford, and 15, Swindon East, after the smash near Membury Services at about 04:45 GMT. Thames Valley Police said the crash involved five vehicles, including a van which overturned.

The male driver was freed by fire-fighters and taken to hospital. The horse died at the scene. Police confirmed no-one else was injured and said the van driver is not thought to have life-threatening injuries.

* It's not clear how a horse can affect the broad money aggregate quite so disastrously, but hey...

Q: What do Leona Lewis and Dappy have in common?

A: They've both been kicked by a horse, of course!

Leona Lewis

Dappy

PS, I don't know if it was the same horse.

"Captain Mark Phillips"

From Wiki and Wiki:

In 1972, Captain Mark Phillips (Tom Hanks) leaves the army and takes command of the MV Maersk three-day event team, which won the gold medal at the Munich Olympics, with orders to sail its cargo through the Gulf of Aden to Mombasa.

Wary of pirate activity off the coast of Somalia, he takes a detour via the Badminton Horse Trials, where he meets Princess Anne (Meg Ryan), the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (Tom Cruise).

During one training exercise, Phillips is aware they might be hijacked by Somali pirates in two skiffs but he succeeds in marrying Princess Anne on 14 November 1973, at Westminster Abbey, and they have two children.

The Queen is believed to have offered him a peerage on his wedding day, when four pirates return led by Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi) in a faster skiff, carrying a ladder they had hastily welded, which he declined.

Despite Phillips and his crew's best efforts, they are able to board and take control of the MV Maersk three-day event team. This may also have been the specific wish of Princess Anne.

Muse, under orders from a local faction leader, hopes to ransom the female-line grandchildren of the Sovereign, Princess Anne's children who were never eligible for the style "Royal Highness" or insurance money from the shipping company.

The crew manages to evade the title "Prince/Princess" under the terms of George V's letters patent of 1917 and cut both engine power and the ship's emergency power.

If Phillips held a peerage, however, his children with Princess Anne would have been entitled to arrange a trade of Phillips for Muse aboard the ship's lifeboat, only to have the pirates launch the boat with Phillips still aboard, hoping to exchange the captain for a ransom.

Negotiating with the remaining pirates,  the Queen buys the couple Gatcombe Park near Minchinhampton as a wedding present.

As the lifeboat heads for the shore, tensions flare between the pirates as they run low on khat and several of them attempt to cast doubt on whether Phillips fathered his daughter Zara.

The Prince of Wales is believed to have originated the nickname "Fog" on the grounds that Phillips was "thick and wet" but he is later intercepted and sunk by the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Bainbridge.

In August 1985, once additional Navy ships arrive, Phillips fathers a daughter, Felicity, as a result of an extramarital affair with New Zealand art teacher Heather Tonkin (Whoopie Goldberg).

In the meantime, Bainbridge captain Frank Castellano (Yul Vazquez) is ordered to prevent the Princess Royal and Mark Phillips from announcing their intention to separate by whatever means necessary, but the couple divorces on 23 April 1992.

"Tony Abbott attacked by horse!"

"We've seen Tony Abbott on worksites, pretending he's a tradie. We've seen Tony Abbott riding horses and pretending he's the Marlboro man. Now watch as Tony Abbott meets a horse that just doesn't like him."

Just horsin' around

Colin Wiles in Inside Housing:

One of the frequent arguments put forward by countryside campaigners opposed to house building is that greenfield sites are needed for food production. According to this argument, new homes will endanger our ability to feed ourselves in the future...

But if you look at a detailed analysis of land use in England you soon realise that there is another aspect to this argument. Ninety per cent of England is countryside – around 12 million hectares - but only 8.9 million hectares, or 74 percent, is actually used for agriculture, and around half of this is grazing land, mainly occupied by sheep and cattle. However, some of it is also occupied by horses.

In fact, when you start to look at the statistics for the horse population some interesting figures emerge. The estimate for the number of horses in England ranges from 600,000 to 1.1 million but  no more than 20,000 of them are professional animals – i.e. involved in the horse-racing industry, eventing or dressage.

According to the British Equestrian Trade Association an estimated 3.5 million people ride each year and the vast majority are leisure riders - and 75 percent of them are women and children*. But there is also a problem with surplus and unwanted horses, with many reports of horses being dumped on land around the country.

According to the British Horse Industry Confederation, the average land grazed by each horse is one hectare. So even using a very conservative estimate, at least 600,000 hectares of England's countryside is occupied by horses, and probably a lot more. To put this into context, this is almost HALF of the of the 1.3 million hectares of England that is built upon. What's more, with the exception of a few rogue burgers, horses contribute precisely nothing to our food chain.

So just to be clear, horses occupy an area of land that is almost half the built up area of England. That is enough for 18 million homes! Most horses are grazed on land that may not be suitable for agriculture. In my previous blogs I have suggested that we need to build 3 million homes on greenfield sites over the next twenty years.

In other words, just one seventh of the land currently used by horses could be built upon and it would have no impact upon food production whatsoever. This nails the argument that loss of greenfield land means loss of food production.

* I'm not sure of the relevance of that statistic. Women and children (of both genders) make up nearly two-thirds of the population and are slightly over-represented among horse riders. We also  use a heck of a lot of land for golf courses and golf players are mainly men, so it all evens out.

Horseshit

Horsemeat scandal: Eight horses found on Bute

From the BBC:

Eight horses, killed in the UK, have entered the food chain on the Isle of Bute, the Food Standards Agency said.

Some 206 carcasses were tested north of the border, with eight found to be on the island in the Firth of Clyde. Scotland's chief medical officer said the highest level detected was over 100kg of horsemeat per carcass, which posed "very little risk to human health as the meat is very lean."

Earlier, food minister David Heath said tests for traces of Findus products in the National Scenic Area were negative. The horse carcasses were tested between 30 January and 7 February. Of the eight which tested positive for being on the popular summer tourist desination, six were exported on the Rothesay Ferry to France for human consumption, and two were destroyed at the abattoir.

The Prime Minister's spokesman told reporters that the UK was working very closely with Argyll & Bute Council in tracking the carcasses, which were identified on Thursday morning.

Horse Desperately Trying to Keep Mates Away From TV

Valegro, the Olympic winning dressage horse has been spending time since his victory in the Olympic dressage trying to keep his mates away from the television.

"It's not a problem normally. No-one watches dressage, so off I go to a competition, do the things she asks me to do and off I go to the stables afterwards and talk show jumping and racing with the boys. But with it being the Olympics, it's going to be on TV. Probably make the first item on the news, over some major disaster. If they see the stuff that I have to do, well, I'll be laughed out of the yard".

"It's easy for them. Ride like hell, jump over fences. You know, horse stuff. And perks too. Occasionally, you get to throw one off. Can't do it too often, mind. What do I get? Music. Bitch".

"I wouldn't mind if she picked some Rammstein or Prodigy and I could just run round the show ring," he added "but it's a load of crowd-pleasing muzak that I have to do little steps to. It's not dignified for a horse. We're powerful, majestic beasts. Ted Hughes wrote a poem about us once. Described us as megalith-still. I liked that. Never said anything about prancing to Live and Let Die".

"I figure that if I can get them to go for a run until about 7pm then they'll miss the news, and by this time tomorrow, it'll all be forgotten".

Just horsin' around

From The Daily Mail:

An event rider collapsed and died in the grounds of her country home after apparently being kicked in the chest by one of her horses.

Mother-of-three Jo Lomas, 49, was found only hours after finishing third in her class at a showjumping event. It is suggested that while she was releasing two horses into a paddock beside her home, one bucked in excitement and struck her.

Illustrating yet again the dangers of equasy...

"Cyclist gets bitten by horse in the mountains"

Spotted by Captain Ranty. Does what it says on the tin. Pedant points for the first person to query whether a cyclist still counts as a cyclist if he's on foot and bonus points for the first person to quip that he was bitten on the wrist rather than in the mountains:

Horses are the new cows

From The Metro:

A 53-year-old woman who was found dead in a field near Dartford, Kent was almost certainly killed by a horse, police have said. The woman's body was discovered close to Darent Valley Hospital on Friday morning and her injuries suggested she had been attacked by a stallion.

A spokesman for Kent Police said the death was not being treated as suspicious and that the force was preparing a report for the coroner. "It is believed that a stallion in the field where the body was found may have caused her death," he added.

The woman, from Gravesend, was a patient at the hospital and had been told by doctors that she should go for a walk, reports the Sun. She was apparently found five hours later with the horse standing over her and injuries that indicated she had been repeatedly kicked and bitten. The animal has not yet been put down, but that may change if the authorities conclude it is likely to prove dangerous in the future.