Five little donkeys will be offering youngsters in south Essex a taste of traditional seaside fun, but not on the seaside.Barmy animal rights nutters again?
Jayne Johns wanted to offer donkey rides on Southend seafront, but was told by the council she wasn’t allowed.
But she has been given permission by Rochford District Council to start the rides in the car park and play area of Hockley Woods.
No, this is barmy council nutters:
John Lamb, Southend councillor responsible for tourism and regeneration, explained why the donkeys were not allowed on the beach.Apparantly, offering to clean up after the donkeys isn’t going to help:
He said: “The problem we have is we have Blue Flag and Coastal Award beaches, which restrict what we can and can’t do. ”
“They might say they will pick up the donkey mess but they can’t pick up urine. We need to safeguard the water quality and keep the beaches clean to get the awards which attract visitors. ”Which is odd, because as people point out in the comments, dogs are allowed on the beach Oct-Apr. Do they not pee on the sand?
Come to think of it, since this is Southend, do toddlers not pee on the sand as well?
“I love donkeys and remember having rides as a child but times have changed.”Yes, indeed, times have changed. Now, we elect dumb, unwilling, stubborn animals to council seats instead of letting kiddies ride them…
10 comments:
"Since this is Southend, do toddlers not pee on the sand as well?"
Since this is Southend I'll bet plenty of the adults do too.....
I have some bad news for him about what happens it the woods too.
This is obviously the little known EU Equidae Micturation Mitigation Act of 2002 being suitably Gold Plated by the Southend Council? Acting as always like the South End of a North-going Ass.
I have some bad news about the seawater as well -
http://www.spreadshirt.com/black-i-don-t-drink-water-fish-fuck-in-i-C3392A5194707
Are they totally unaware of the generous EU grants available for eco-friendly carbon-neutral animal nappies?
(I made this up. Any similarity to any EU bollocks will be a horrible coincidence.)
Perhaps Ms Johns should dress her donkeys in animal nappies, each printed with the slogan "Full of crap, just like the council"?
And yet another taxpayer (ie me) funded, brainless oxygen waster gets his 15 minutes of fame.
Storm the council chambers with pitchforks in hand and guillotine the lot of them in the car park. Then pack the bodies into the biodegradable sacks distributed fortnightly to all households in the borough by the council's refuse disposal operatives and deposit at the local citizen amenity centre during the published opening times in winter or between sunrise and sunset in summer ensuring that they are placed only in the skip labelled for the disposal of council waste.
In my experience the least that you would need to worry about is an insignificant deposit of donkey urine! Here on the sunshine coast human excrement and discarded nappies is the bigger problem, left by visitors who presumably come because of the blue flag status.
Considering that the beaches get a cleaning fron the tide,and the real problem with beach cleanliness is what is brought in rather that what gets taken out; what are thet really concerned about?
Yep, Mud in the Blood, we live on an island in an ocean prone to lunar tides which about twice a day send gazillions of water onto and under beaches to both remove small particles and chemicals and also to deposit flotsam and jetsam. Funny how the pols missed that tiny feature of the Moon's gravitational field that - let's be fair - has only been working for hundreds of millions of years. Presumably, most Council officials haven't got so far into "Nelson Mandela: The Astronaut Years" to be aware of this odd feature of the Planet Earth's non-landlocked waters. Perhaps this kind of thing was invented for the Mediterranean which isn't tidal?
Still, you can't have it all, AND your bins checked, monitored for contraband rubbish and collected every two weeks or so, insh'alla.
'Everyone pees on the sand,' said the little boy, 'Yes' said his dad, 'But not from the pier'
"Since this is Southend I'll bet plenty of the adults do too....."
Heh! True...
"Are they totally unaware of the generous EU grants available for eco-friendly carbon-neutral animal nappies?"
Actually, that's a little too close to the truth to be funny!
"Considering that the beaches get a cleaning fron the tide,and the real problem with beach cleanliness is what is brought in rather that what gets taken out; what are thet really concerned about?"
I suspect that they are really concerned about is that someone, somewhere, might be having some fun...
The Blue Flag scheme is administed by Keep Britain Tidy. An application costs £630 + VAT.
KBT has an income of about £9m, of which £5m is a straight grant from DEFRA and the other £4m is from things such as sales of membership, fees for award schemes etc.
I've read through the criteria and it doesn't ban donkeys. However, they have to be controlled and cleaned up after. Fair enough. Theoretically their dung could affect the coliform count, but we are talking about the ratio of donkey poo to the Thames Estuary here.
The criteria also demand a form of "sustainable transport". There, that's what she should be doing, running a little donkey sleigh along the sand.
Sooo...we pay for KBT via our taxes to DEFRA, and then the council taxpayers of Southend pay KBT to come round and do a giant tick-box exercise which the council should already have sorted out for themselves as part of the job of running a beach for which they have already been paid, and finally KBT plant a blue flag and flog a load of extra handbooks, courses etc which the council should also already know.
This is bonkers. It is one bureaucracy funded by us screwing more money out of another bureaucracy funded by us. Somebody should do an FOI to Southend Council to discover how much they have paid in total to KBT over the last five years.
It's not donkey dung we should be worried about.
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