A horse is a horse, of course, but it's what comes out of the horse that's bugging Ted Robinson. The Wheat Ridge resident lives next door to Kim and Curt Fear and their 22-year-old mare. And though the horse's name is Song, these days Robinson is the one singing the blues.
"How would you feel if the smell of horse manure mixed in with the smell of your barbecue cooking?" he asks, his voice rising in pitch as he re-creates the olfactory ambience of a recent meal. "How would you feel if you looked out the window and there's the horse with his ass aimed right at your face and sh-- coming out of his ass and then he pisses two gallons?"
Viewed from that angle, perhaps it's no wonder that Robinson and his neighbors Jo Anne Howard and Floyd and Vera Dunsmoor have spent the past eight months waging a long--and so far unsuccessful--campaign to get rid of the stinky steed. Their claim: that while the horse's presence in the neighborhood may be legal under Wheat Ridge zoning, Song's manure has hit too many sour notes and thus violated the city's nine-year-old odor ordinance.
Earlier this month the issue of Song's excrement was even aired out in a Wheat Ridge municipal courtroom, and hardly anyone breathed easier when the judge dismissed the case. "I'm bitter," complains Kim Fear, who says she shelled out $2,000 in attorney's fees to fend off the legal charge. Robinson and the other neighbors called the trial a farce because they lost. At least one city official, meanwhile, says it was a farce that there was a trial at all.
"Code-enforcement officials were there, and animal-control officials," says Nick Fisher, the city's animal-enforcement supervisor. "The chief of police even testified that he couldn't smell anything. I don't think it should have even got to court. But the neighbors were so adamant. We figured, 'Let's get them into court. That way we can appease them.'"
Kim and Curt Fear moved into their home on West 32nd Avenue in September 1996, and Song moved in a month later. Kim Fear was particularly excited that the property was zoned for horses; she's owned Song most of the mare's life but had never before been able to keep the animal on her own land.
Fear says she had no contact with the complaining neighbors--not so much as a hello--until early this year, when she had a conversation with Floyd Dunsmoor. Fear says the 81-year-old Dunsmoor told her that the neighbors didn't like the horse being there and planned to take their case to the city.
"Animals were here before, and he complained and got rid of them," Fear says. "That was the first [sign] we were going to have problems."
Dunsmoor makes no apologies for the legal horse race that followed. "That damn horse smells like hell most of the time," asserts Dunsmoor, who claims the animal lives just twenty feet from his patio. "We're all disappointed. This is no place for a horse."
Despite the fact that horses are allowed under the law, Dunsmoor and the other neighbors say they have a right to raise a stink. The code permitting horses was written in the days when Wheat Ridge was mainly a rural farming community. Although the Fears have a large lot, they're surrounded by several homes. "The city has grown up around this code, and nobody's bothered to correct this," Robinson says.
The neighbors did catch the Fears in two violations of city ordinances earlier this year. In a letter from the city in March, the couple was informed that they had built their pen too close to their neighbors' property and that they had allowed too much manure to accumulate. So the Fears moved the pen back to its required distance, fifteen feet from the property line. And Kim Fear began shoveling manure several times a week.
After that, she says, "everything seemed okay," and she assumed that was the end of it. But then she found out that her neighbors were taking their complaints to the city council. When that failed to achieve anything, they began bombarding the city with letters and phone calls until code-enforcement workers--and later animal-control workers--started coming out to investigate.
"Both code enforcement and animal enforcement sniffed the air to see if they could smell anything," says police chief Jack Hurst. "Some could smell a horse smell but didn't think it was a problem."
To Robinson, that's hardly a shock. "The animal-control guys were totally on the side of the horse and the Fears," he claims. "These are farm boys. They probably spent their whole lives smelling horse manure, horse piss and getting bit by flies. They've probably got a bucket of horseshit sitting by their bed."
Closing his windows at the first whiff of trouble, Robinson says, wasn't an option. "What are you talking about?" he demands. "It's hot in July. We didn't have air conditioning." Jo Anne Howard adds that animal-control officers never came out in the evening hours, when the pony perfume typically reached its fragrant peak.
City officials had already advised the neighbors that the only way to formally prove an odor violation was for the complaining residents to agree on a specific day and time when they had all smelled the offending stench. So Robinson took the initiative.
