Back in 2000-2001, I owned a horse. Her name was Jubilee and she was a long-held dream that finally became reality. She was a lot of work, but she was worth it. She was also the creator of several interesting situations. You know, poop-wise.

One nice thing was that Jubilee would give plenty of warning before she pooped. She'd always raise her tail a few times and have some gas. The one right before she pooped was always smelly. So at least I never ended up getting pooped on. That did happen to a girl I read about in a magazine.

One time, Jubilee was standing next to the wall when she had to poop. So she raised her tail and pooped. It hit the wall before falling to the floor, creating a brown spot on the wall. She did this at least twice.

Another thing Jubilee loved to do was pull all her hay onto the floor of the stall and create a nest out of it to sleep on. Of course, this meant that the hay was often peed and pooped upon. It created quite the job for me when I arrived in the morning to feed her and clean out the stall.

Sometimes, while I was cleaning out the stall, after I had gotten the dirty bedding taken care of, Jubilee would poop on the bare floor before I had a chance to put down clean bedding. That was a nuisance, but I would simply pick it up and get rid of it. It was worse when she would pee on the bare floor. Then I would have to put shavings down, let them absorb the liquid, and then clean up the shavings and put down more.

Then there was the time that the people with whom I was boarding Jubilee said I had to clean out her paddock. That meant picking up all the individual poops she had made, plus the poops she had made in her huge hay nest. So I had to clean that up. Part of the problem was that this happened in the spring and the nest was still partially frozen. This meant it took me several weeks to get the nest cleaned out.

Those weren't the worst things that Jubilee ever did, though. You know, poop-wise.

One morning, while I was cleaning out her stall, Jubilee was turned to face the door with her butt facing her water bucket. I came into the stall just as Jubilee raised her tail and pooped into the water bucket. I stood there in shock for a few minutes, not able to believe what I had just seen her do. I went over to the water bucket and, lo and behold, there was horse poop floating in the bucket of water.

Okay, now what do I do? I went and got the apple picker (horse poop is often referred to as horse apples, and the apple picker is a large basket with long tines on the end attached to a wooden pole that is used to pick them up off the ground or the bottom of the stall). I used that as much as I could to get the apples out and onto the stall floor, where I would then take them out when I took out the rest of the soiled bedding.

But there were still horse apples floating in the bucket that I hadn't been able to get, because they had started to disintegrate. It was the middle of winter, so I was using a heated water bucket to keep the water from icing over. Then, of course, there was the problem of any horse poop that might have been settled on the sides and bottom of the bucket.

I remembered an old bucket I had used until I got the heated one. I decided to use this to bail out the poopy water and dump it outside.

I got the old bucket. Just as I was about to leave, I saw an old brush that I knew nobody ever used anymore. It had a handle, so I took it and decided to use it to clean out Jubilee's bucket before I dumped it. I grabbed a pair of yellow latex gloves and put them on, too.

Back in the stall, I used the brush to scrub at the sides of the bucket and swirl the water around to get the sediment off the bottom long enough to get the water transferred. Once the water was swirling in the bucket, I unhooked it and poured it into the other bucket. The water was brown from horse poop. It also had bits of hay in it, but that happened a lot because Jubilee would take drinks of water when she still had hay in her mouth and the hay would go in the water. I was used to that.

I carried the dirty water out and dumped it, scrubbing the transfer bucket thoroughly with the same brush before filling the bucket with fresh water and taking it back to Jubilee. It took me two trips to the pump and back before the bucket was full.

From then on, I was always on the alert for horse poop in the water bucket.