back to article Noxious algae menace Brittany beaches

Environmentalists and locals staged a protest last weekend on the beach at St-Michel-en-Grève in Brittany, after noxious algae killed a local vet's horse and very nearly did for him too. Vincent Petit, 27, was dragged unconscious from a metre-deep patch of sludge, after his mount succumbed to fumes from the rotting greenery. …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Erk...

    Sounds like the environmentalists are right, nitrate would be a prime suspect - anyone with a marine aquarium will know that you only need to let the nitrate rise a couple of ppm and all of a sudden your tank is a green mess...

  2. Bassey
    Thumb Up

    Sounds good

    Anything that stops horses riding (and shitting) on beaches has to be a good thing. And if a few of their over-bearing owners get caught up as collateral damage then all the better. Can we get some of that over here?

  3. Greg J Preece

    Ooh, organic

    I would *LOVE* for them to go organic-only, just to prove what a load of bullshit organic farming is.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Real Live Farmer

    What would installing an organic farm do? I thought they were trying to blame Livestock. We love the countryside, but only if its just a clean mowed field and no smells. An organic produce farm, would generally be using manure spread far and wide as fertilizer. Animal Manure contains Ammonium Phosphorus, and Potassium. An organic farm would not be treating their manure with stabilizers that would balance levels needed to match the soil. By the way the Phosphorus levels are usually blamed for excessive algae growth in irrigation ponds.

    In an organic farm, certain shots, medicine etc. would then no longer be administered to the animals resulting in poor quality food for consumers. As well as higher risk of food contamination. And as far as organic goes, 80% of the organic(carbon based) chemicals used can still kill a person in small doses, just as fast as inorganic(everything not carbon based).

  5. Stevie

    Bah!

    Toss in a few packets of Green Out(TM) pool shock and algaecide and have done with it once and for all. All this dolphin-kissing and whale-hugging is getting those French sunbathers nowhere. What is needed is industrial strength chemicals to fight this, in my opinion, entirely natural phenomenon caused by the sea's obvious desire to stamp out the littoral French.

    Alternately you could join the dolphin-kissing whale-huggers in embracing the Gaia hypothesis and simply let things take their course. Local French people snuffed out of existence by stinky algae - pigs, chickens etc starve to death - chemical inwash subsides, algae dies off, stench of rotting non-aquatic now-dead once-life-forms eventually subsides and life is once again idyllic on the coast of Brittany, which can be settled anew by young people looking for affordable housing.

    Assuming global warming doesn't cause the shorline to advance inland a few miles, claiming all that newly available real estate.

  6. Adam 10
    Joke

    Swimming shorts

    Must be all those people wearing swimming shorts, hence why France has banned them.

    Save the horses, wear a banana hammock.

  7. spegru

    Went there in '94

    Nasty Algae. So it's been a problem for a very long time.

    Never knew it was associated with farming though

  8. disgruntled yank

    query

    Any word on why the vet rode his horse into meter-deep slime?

This topic is closed for new posts.