Nope, not ranting. I've just been thinking this since I saw the original post yesterday and I had to say it somewhere.

So this person posted that the part-time stable help decided to clean the poster's horse's water trough. And did so by pouring a bunch of bleach into the water and... walking away.

Poster's Horse came into the stall, took a sip, spat it out. Poster went to investigate, smelled bleach, freaked.

I can totally sympathize with this reaction.

In the course of the discussion a couple of people pointed out that bleach, in tiny quantities, is no big deal so the freakout was unwarranted, if understandable. A tiny amount of bleach can render iffy water potable.

However, everyone agreed you're not supposed to be able to smell it.

I heroically restrained myself from sharing the story about the time someone dosed the apple juice at an event in San Francisco attended by, among others, the Grateful Dead. (I don't think they were the culprits this time.) Phil Lesh described taking a drink of what he knew darned well was juice with LSD in it, and noticing a strange and unfamiliar flavour.

And then he realized, holy crap, there was so much acid in the apple juice that he could taste it! You're not supposed to be able to taste the acid!

Apparently it was the trip to end all trips, but although a number of people got "profoundly disoriented," as Bob Weir would say, nobody got hurt and everyone who wandered off eventually turned up safely.

You can see why I was tempted to relate this story, and also why it's probably just as well that I didn't. Even so.

And the horse was fine, too. I hope his owner had a chat with the barn owners about the staff, you know, rinsing out water buckets after treating them with chemicals, but hey. (And I also picked up the tip that Listerine is pretty good for cleaning dirty buckets, which is handy to know since there's a lot of iron in the water at our barn and the plastic water buckets do get stained.)