Christina Websell wrote:

snipped
Ragwort can kill horses and ponies if it is allowed to be dried in hay.
Here's a list of poisonous plants some of which are common in the U.K.
Amongst them such normal items of diet as red kidney beans and llma
beans.
I don't hear any great demand for these plants to be be banned on the
grounds they can poison human beings. But horses now, there's a
different canof worms.
You are spouting the old well worn doctrine of the British Horse Society
which has been discredited for many years now.

Of course ragwort can kill horse and ponies and cows and lambs and
others. But sensible owners make sure their pastures are free of it,
and are careful to buy in straw and hay from only reputable sources. In
any case, fresh standing ragwort will not be taken by horse or farm
animals, as it is far too bitter to ingest. Only when dried is it
dangerous. So buy hay from a good merchant, not the cheapest.

Any stock owner who suffers animal deaths from ragwort has only
themselves to blame.

Peter

Yeah, I buy some bales of hay from a farmer and there is dried ragwort in
it, and it kills my horses. How is that my fault exactly?
You know that no farmer worthy of the name would allow ragwort to grow
in his pastures or hay fields. Every livestock farmer I've ever known,
and I spent a working lifetime selling farm machinery in the West
Country, walked his pastures regularly and inspected them for ragwort
and other injurious plants. Those that didn't were known to be scruffy
useless layabouts who were forced into selling their hay for cash flow
reasons, and were just the types not to bother inspecting their
pastures. You buy hay from them, then that's down to you. Buy from a
well known hay and straw Merchant and the chances are that he knows
where the hay originated and you do have some sort of comeback.

But I repeat, and repeat again, the numbers of animal farm deaths
reported to DEFRA caused by ragwort poisoning up to 2011 were ZERO.
In spite of the nonsense trumpeted by the British Horse Society the
horses killed by ragwort up to 2011 were also ZERO.

Peter


--
It is necessary for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

Attributed to Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797