Category: Home Sweet Home

Which thoughts cross your mind when you think about horse riding? In my mind I see little girls who dream about winning ribbons in equestrian tournaments, or I picture Europe’s royalty wearing ridiculously huge hats and feverishly watching the world-famous horse race at Ascot, or I even think of the lonesome cowboy from a renowned cigarette commercial galloping through the American prairie… Despite – or probably because of all these clichés about it, the popularity of horse riding as a hobby doesn’t seem to wear off… But one thing is sure: horse riding is, without doubt, quite a time-consuming and costly hobby.

One of the most important pieces of equipment a rider needs is a saddle. But don’t let yourself be fooled… Finding the right saddle for your horse and your specific discipline seems like an almost impossible task to me. After an extensive research on the internet, it becomes obvious that you can easily spend a small fortune on a saddle made from the finest leather and decorated with fancy silver clasps and ornaments which are typical for a western style saddle for example.

But these valuable saddles are often stored in draughty, unheated and easily accessible tack rooms where not only thieves have a walk-over but also moisture and mould. Musty smells and mould spots are a sure sign for too much humidity in the ambient air. All the metal pieces of a saddle can start to rust with a relative humidity of only 60 %, and when the relative humidity tops 70 %, mould begins to form on your saddle. Yet when the relative humidity is too low, the leather of your saddle can become brittle and chapped.
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There are many people who think that there is only one species to blame for the alarming and mind-boggling weather phenomena, the melting ice caps, the disappearing glaciers and the steadily rising sea levels which we have experienced over the past decades and years. For these people there is only one possible culprit who is responsible for global warming brought on by the build-up of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (from transport, tourism and industry), methane (from factory farming) and CFCs (from spray aerosols) in the earth’s atmosphere, and that is man. Man may have succeeded in landing on the moon and creating genetically engineered life, but at the same time he has also succeeded in polluting the planet and bringing the world as we know it to the brink of an ecological disaster.

And yet there are also those who say that this would all have happened anyway …

The opinions on global warming are divided. There is a broad phalanx of experts and millions above millions of people especially in the so-called civilised western industrialised world who defy the theory that it is mankind who has caused the Earth to heat up by 0.74C degrees over the past century and that despite the almost universal ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (the United States has yet to sign the treaty), which has as its goal the stabilisation of the levels of said greenhouse gases in order to prevent more far-reaching climate changes from occurring, they staunchly say that global warming is all part of a natural geological process and that we should not be attaching so much significance to man’s role on the planet.

And the opinions are equally split on humidifiers. Read More