Establishing an Everyday Routine

In This Chapter

• Feeding and watering your horse
• Managing your horse’s health and environment

Owning a horse means caring for him every single day. You may find that you actually look forward to the time you spend in the stable cleaning up after your horse and tending to his needs. Or, you may think of it as nothing more than a necessary chore. The truth of the matter is that regardless of whether you feel like it, you have to do it, even on those days when rain is falling like mad and the last thing you want to do is trudge through the mud and muck to get to the barn.

As a horse owner with a horse on your own property, you must deal with three major factors in your horse’s care: feeding, exercising, and managing the horse’s environment. If you handle all of these areas properly, you not only will be highly regarded by your neighbors and fellow horse owners, but your horse will love you for it, too.

Remember

If you’re boarding your horse rather than keeping him on your own property, don’t think that you’re completely off the hook. Making sure that your horse’s boarding facility adheres to the standards we describe regarding feeding, watering, and stable management is your responsibility. Although the boarding stable does this part of the job, you still must provide the horse with daily exercise and hands-on care.

Handling Your Horse’s Hunger and Thirst

Food is very important to a horse, probably even more important than it is to humans. Nature designed the horse to spend the majority of his time chewing, swallowing, and digesting. The equine digestive system is meant to be constantly on the go and to process vast quantities of fibrous foods.

The following sections cover foods that your horse needs and different methods you can use to feed your horse properly.

Figuring out what to feed your horse

Much confusion exists in the horse world about the best food to feed a horse. The reason for this confusion probably lies in the fact that individual horses have different nutritional requirements. Factors in determining the best diet for a horse include where and how the horse lives and what kind of work the horse does in addition to the horse’s own physiological makeup.

Remember

The best person to guide you when it comes to your horse’s diet is your vet. Your vet is familiar with your individual horse and his nutritional needs and should also be up on the local availability of different kinds of hay. (See Chapter Preventing Equine Health Problems for more details on finding a vet.)

Here’s some general information on horse feeds to get you started. (All of these feeds, with the exception of pasture grass, can be purchased at a local feed store):

- Hay: Hay is a feedstuff composed of plants that have been cut, dried, and baled. Bales of hay are available from feed stores. Two different types of hays exist: legumes and grasses. Alfalfa is the legume horses most commonly eat, but clover is another option, depending on where you live. Timothy, orchard, and Bermuda are the most common grass hays. Coastal, brome, fescue, oat, and rye are other grasses to try.

Remember

Hay is a good feed because it provides roughage in addition to proper nutrition. The roughage keeps the horse’s digestive system working properly and satisfies the horse’s natural urge to chew.

If you keep your horse stabled (instead of in a viable pasture), we recommend feeding at least two to three flakes (a flake is a section of a bale of hay, weighing around 4 pounds) of an alfalfa and grass hay mix (preferably timothy, because this grass hay has higher nutritional qualities than other commonly available grass hays) per day for a horse of average weight (1,100 pounds) that gets at least 30 minutes of solid exercise, two to three times per week. If an alfalfa/grass hay mix is not available, feed one flake of alfalfa and one flake of grass per day. Provided your horse is an average-sized adult on a moderate exercise program, either of these types of hay should provide all of the energy and nutrients your horse needs to maintain his normal body weight. If your horse has trouble keeping weight on, provide two flakes of alfalfa and one flake of grass each day. If your horse tends to be overweight, feed a little less alfalfa.

Tip

(Consult with your veterinarian about how much food your particular horse should be receiving.) Generally speaking, legumes such as alfalfa are the best feed for horses that need to put on and maintain weight, and for horses that work on a regular basis. Timothy and other grass hays are good for horses that need to lose weight and don’t work as hard.

- Hay cubes: You can feed your horse concentrated blocks of hay called hay cubes. Hay cubes tend to be cheaper than hay and are good for:

• Older horses with worn-down teeth because cubes break apart quickly when chewed.
• Horses with respiratory problems because cubes are less dusty than regular hay.
• Horses that have trouble keeping on weight.

However, most horses prefer baled hay to cubes because baled hay satisfies their need to chew.

- Pellets: Another form of concentrated feed is pellets made from alfalfa. Pellets are even cheaper than hay cubes, but they’re not at the top of our list of recommended feeds unless you have a horse that has respiratory problems or trouble keeping on weight. Horses can easily choke on pellets, and pellets provide little in the way of chewing satisfaction for the horse. Pellets can make a good supplement to a diet consisting primarily of hay, however.

- Pasture: Horses do best when they can graze in a pasture because grazing is most natural for them; however, providing your horse with lush pasture requires work and knowledge. If you live on property where pasture has already been cultivated, your task is to carefully maintain it. If you want to start a pasture from scratch, you need help. Contact your local agricultural agency for assistance in starting and maintaining a quality horse pasture. You can find this government agency in your telephone directory. (Check out Chapter Housing Your Horse Comfortably for more tips on setting up and maintaining a pasture at home.)

You can grow a number of different kinds of pasture grasses for equine consumption. Timothy, bromegrass, fescue, bluegrass, and orchard grass are among the types that horses enjoy. Talk to your veterinarian about which of the grasses that grow in your area best suit your horse.

Warning!

Do not graze a pregnant mare on fescue, because doing so can cause the mare to spontaneously abort the foal.

Horses need to be started gradually on pasture grass so it doesn’t upset their digestive systems. Allow only an hour of grazing per day for several days, and then increase to two hours, and so on.

If your pasture doesn’t yield a substantial amount of good-quality, nutritious grass, supplement your horse’s diet with a daily ration of hay. If you don’t, the horse may suffer from malnutrition. To verify that your pasture is of good quality, call your local agricultural office and ask an expert to inspect your pasture and help analyze its nutritional content.

Pay attention to weed control. Any number of toxic plants can invade your pasture, causing liver disease, and neurological disorders. Contact your agricultural office for a list of plants in your region that are toxic to horses.

- Grain: When it comes to horse food, people often think of grain as a staple of the equine diet. However, if your horse is receiving only moderate exercise, he probably doesn’t need any grain. Grain is a high-energy carbohydrate that does wonders for racehorses and other serious equine athletes but usually does little for the average horse other than leave him with too much energy. One exception to this rule is a horse pastured in extremely cold weather that needs the extra source of energy to stay warm.

If you want to give your horse an occasional treat of grain, do so in moderation, maybe a small amount once or twice a week. Oats, barley, corn, or a combination of these with molasses are healthy grains that you can feed every so often in small amounts. A serving of one or two cups of grain makes a nice snack for your horse.

- Bran: Horse people love to give their horses warm bran mashes, and horses love eating them. Just remember not to give your horse too much too often (not more than once a week at the most). To feed bran (which you can buy in your local feed store, by the way), use a bucket to mix four to five cups of bran with some chopped up carrots or apples, and a small amount of grain. Add enough warm water to make the bran wet but not soupy. (Many people give their horses a bran mash before a long trailer ride to prevent colic.)

- Commercial feeds: Horse owners have access to good-quality commercial horse feeds. Available in tack stores, these pelleted feeds range from simple mixes like alfalfa and molasses (great for mixing with vitamins, supplements, and medications) to complex extruded feeds, which get their name from the way they’re made (many extruded feeds are designed for older horses, very active horses, horses with trouble keeping on weight, and young horses).

Tip

We’re big advocates of complex extruded feeds in place of grain because they’re designed specifically with horses in mind and balanced with vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, and fats. Talk to your veterinarian to find out whether your horse may benefit from a commercial feed.

- Treats: Few things rate as high on a horse’s list as treats. All kinds of commercial horse treats are available at your local tack store. Or you can stick with two old favorites: carrots and red apples cut up in small pieces to prevent choking (especially important with ponies). The proverbial lump of sugar is okay only once in a while — it provides absolutely no nutritional value and isn’t very good for the horse. (You can give healthy treats to your horse as often as you like.)

- Fat: Horses tend to get very little fat in their diets, even though this nutrient is required for basic equine function. If your horse is worked consistently and has trouble maintaining his weight, give him one cup of vegetable oil daily, mixed in with the grain or other supplemental feed (an alfalfa and molasses mix called A & M is good for this). If your horse tends to be overweight, reduce the oil to half a cup.

Remember

- Vitamins: Horses need plenty of vitamins and minerals for good health. Many small problems ranging from lameness to colic to infection can result from vitamin and mineral deficiencies. We recommend that you give your horse a dose of equine multivitamin supplement every day or every other day. Talk to your vet about what your horse’s individual vitamin needs may be.

- Minerals: Provide your horse with access to a mineral salt block in his feeder or paddock. Mineral salt blocks are available at your local feed store. Your horse will lick the block to obtain salt and other minerals he needs.

Remember

The quality of what you feed is just as important as the feed itself. If you buy cheap, poor-quality hay, your horse will suffer for it. Don’t scrimp on this most important aspect of your horse’s care.

Look for the following factors in any hay you buy to ensure its quality:

- Plenty of leaves or blades: Make sure that 60 percent or more of the hay consists of leaves or blades as opposed to stems. Leaves and blades contain most of the hay’s nutrients.

- Good scent: Good quality hay has a pleasant smell. Moldy hay has a foul odor and needs to be avoided at all costs. Dusty hay should be avoided.

- Purity: The bale needs to contain only hay. That means no sticks, dirt, weeds, rope, or other foreign objects.

Knowing how to feed your horse

Remember

Although feeding your horse only once a day would be easier for you, a horse’s digestive system isn’t meant to handle only one large meal. Small, frequent meals are the way to go when feeding horses. Provide a minimum of two feedings of hay per day. Most horse owners feed once in the morning and once at night. Feed three times a day if you can but only if you can do so consistently.

We discuss different feeding ideas to consider in the following sections.

Using a feeder for meals

Always feed your horse out of a feeder. The feeder can be something as simple as a plastic barrel with a side cut out, or a commercial hayrack purchased at a feed store.

Warning!

The purpose of a feeder is to keep your horse from eating directly off the ground. A horse that eats off the ground can easily ingest sand with the feed, resulting in colic or poor absorption of food.

If you decide to feed your horse grain or a commercial feed, provide it to your horse in a shallow bucket or rubber pan. Many commercial feeders are designed so you simply dump the grain or feed directly into them.

Switching feed slowly

If your horse is eating a particular kind of hay or grain and you’d like to change him over to something different because of a change in availability or as result of directions from your vet, be sure to do so very gradually. Sudden, abrupt changes in feed can result in a very sick horse.

By gradually we mean over a period of two weeks. Add 1⁄4 of the new hay to the feed the first few days, and then switch over to 1⁄2 for a few more days. Go to 3⁄4 new hay at the beginning of the second week, and change over completely to the new hay toward the end of that second week.

Feeding treats by hand or by feeder

People are divided when it comes to how to feed their horses treats. Some swear that feeding treats from your hand causes a horse to become bratty and obnoxious. Other people find that their horses don’t misbehave when treats are handfed; they believe that feeding by hand helps foster the bond between horse and human.

Here’s our position: If your horse acts like a spoiled kid when you hand feed treats to him (starts pushing and crowding you, demanding that you hand over all the goods), then your horse is not a candidate for hand feeding. We also recommend against hand feeding whenever you plan to show your horse at halter or another event where the horse needs to behave perfectly when standing at your side. In these cases, give your horse his treats in a bucket or in his feeder.

On the other hand, if your horse is gentle soul who politely waits for you to hand over delectables and doesn’t have a job that requires him to behave a certain way, you can go ahead and feed your horse by hand.

Watering your thirsty horse

We can’t overemphasize the importance of providing plenty of water as part your horse’s daily care. Your horse needs water — lots of it — to stay alive and to ensure a healthy digestive system. (The average horses drinks 8 to 14 gallons a day, and that’s with minimal exercise.) That’s why it’s vitally important that your horse have constant access to clean, fresh H2O at all times.

A few of the different ways that horse owners can provide water include:

- Installing an automatic waterer that automatically refills by using a float system whenever the horse drinks from it (available from feed stores or through equine product catalogs).

- Manually filling a large watering trough (available at feed stores) whenever necessary. If you opt for this method, you have to be diligent in keeping the trough full. The benefit of this approach is that you always know how much water your horse is drinking, which can be valuable information when your horse is feeling under the weather (your vet will need to know).

In either case, keep the waterer clean and free of algae and other debris. You’ll know when your water needs a good scrubbing because it will turn green from algae or you’ll see hay and other stuff floating on the top.

Tip

If you live in a climate where temperatures fall below freezing, you also need to keep your horse’s water supply from turning to ice. You can do so with a heating element made especially for horse waterers (available at your local feed store), or by manually breaking the ice whenever it forms. We recommend the heating element because it requires less work on your part and keeps the water at a warmer temperature, which encourages your horse to drink it.

Taking Care of Other Maintenance Tasks

Daily horsekeeping requires more than just feeding and watering. You also have to keep a close eye on your charge, exercise the critter, clean up after him, and work at keeping pests at bay. All these things are an integral part of maintaining a horse.

A word about turning out Taking a stabled horse and giving it turn-out time, where it can exercise on its own in an arena, is a common practice in the horse world. Advocates of this practice see it as a way for a confined horse to expend some of his pent-up energy by bucking, rearing, running, rolling, and basically just being a horse. Although turn-out time sounds good in theory, we’ve seen plenty of problems arise from this practice. Leg injuries, like bowed tendons and even irreparable fractures, often occur during turnouts. The reason is that horses that are cooped up all day tend to go berserk during turnout time and end up hurting themselves. If you need to turn a horse out for behavioral reasons, or want to turn him out so he can roll (rolling is good for horses because it helps them stretch out their spine and back muscles), warm him up first with a 5- to 10-minute walk, dress him with protective legwear, and turn him out alone (instead of with another horse).

Giving your horse the once over

Horses may seem like rather independent creatures, but in reality, they’re more like half-ton toddlers. They easily get themselves into trouble and sometimes develop problems through no fault of their own.

That’s why your horse needs what we like to call the daily once over. Every day, you must take your horse out of his stall or pasture and examine him from head to toe. This task is easier to do when you are grooming, because grooming calls for close contact between your hands and eyes and the horse’s body. Plus, grooming usually is enjoyable for the horse and helps the two of you bond. (Check out Chapter Keeping Your Horse Clean and Pretty for the complete scoop on grooming.)

Remember

As you go over your horse, check for the following signs of trouble:

- Lumps or bumps

- Scabs or hair loss

- Swellings or hot spots, especially around backs of pasterns, lower legs, and tendon areas (see Chapter Understanding Horses from Head to Hoof)

- Rocks in hooves

- Discharge from eyes or nose; swollen or squinty eyes

- Foul smells, especially in the nose and mouth areas

- Limping, or walking stiffly

- Lack of appetite, depression, unresponsiveness, or sleepiness

For more information about what to do when you discover a problem during your daily once over, see Chapter Examining and Treating Equine Health Troubles.

Exercising your horse for optimum health

Stabled horses need daily exercise to keep their minds and bodies in good working order. Pastured horses don’t need as much exercise as their stabled counterparts, but they still require time under saddle if they are to stay in good physical shape.

Remember

Give your horse a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise per day — more if you have the time (although don’t overdo it if your horse isn’t used to a lot of work). If you don’t have time to tack up and ride, you need to at least take the horse out and walk him for half an hour. On the other hand, 30 minutes of just walking every day isn’t enough exercise for the average horse, so you have to find time to give your equine buddy a good work out at least a few days a week. If you don’t, your horse will start getting a bit crazy from all that pent-up energy, and you’ll pay for it with misbehavior on the rare days when you do ride.

Tip

Although riding is the best way to exercise your horse, you can also vary the routine by occasionally longeing, or exercising him on a rope (see Chapter Working with Your Horse from the Ground for information on longeing). Don’t overdo the longeing, however. Too much of it can put severe stress on your horse’s legs and result in lameness.

Managing manure

One of the least fun things about owning a horse is cleaning up after him. Horses are virtual poop machines that never seem to stop evacuating their bowels. Of course if your horse is producing plenty of waste, that means his digestive system is in good working order. Try keeping that happy thought in mind every time you pick up your shovel.

Manure is not the only waste product your horse produces. Horses also eliminate several gallons of urine per day, creating soiled bedding to clean up.

Remember

We can give you a slew of really good reasons to pick up after your horse on a daily basis, regardless of whether he is pastured or stabled. Here are some of the biggies:

- Your property begins to smell pretty bad if you let manure and urine-soaked bedding pile up.

- Your horse’s health suffers if he is forced to stand in his own waste.

- The accumulated manure and urine provide a breeding ground for bacteria, flies, and internal parasites (covered in the next section).

- You can get in trouble with your neighbors and the law if you don’t clean up.

Scooping manure is really not a difficult job to perform, provided you’re in decent physical shape and have a reasonably healthy back. All you need to do is scoop the poop into a wheelbarrow by using a manure fork, a wonderful invention that separates the manure balls from the dirt or bedding (it’s available at feed stores). Some folks prefer to use a shovel.

Cleaning urine-soaked bedding is a little more difficult, although the shavings, straw, or whatever you chose for your horse’s bed sticks together when it’s wet and so isn’t that hard to remove. You can use your manure fork for this part of the job or a shovel, being careful not to take too much clean bedding with you as you scoop. Remember to replace the removed bedding with clean, fresh stuff when you’re done. (Chapter Housing Your Horse Comfortably has more details on bedding.)

Remember

You can dispose of the gathered waste by either dumping it in a trash receptacle for pick up or keeping it to compost. Whatever you do, be sure to follow the regulations in your municipality regarding equine waste disposal. If you aren’t sure what those rules are, contact your county or city government for information.

Warning!

If you want to compost your horse’s manure and soiled bedding to use in your garden or to spread on the surface of a riding arena, make sure that you age the waste for at least eight weeks. We also suggest that you get a good book on composting so you can find out all about this method of waste disposal. Keep a close eye on your manure pile. Compost piles filled with manure have been known to catch fire as a result of internal combustion caused by the heat of decay.

Controlling pests

Where you find horses, you also find bugs. Flies, gnats, and intestinal worms tend to congregate at stables, dining on the horses and making their lives a living hell. These pests are a cold, harsh reality of the horse world, and all owners can do is try their darnedest to control them.

Remember

If you follow the instructions regarding waste control in the previous section, you’ll already be doing a great deal to control pests in your horse’s environment. Many species of flies and intestinal parasites need access to horse manure to complete their life cycles. So, if you get rid of the manure quickly, the pests can’t reproduce. This factor is especially true of internal parasites, many of which reinfect a horse when it accidentally ingests larvae in his environment.

Tip

In addition to diligent waste removal, you can control flies by

- Hanging fly strips or traps around the barn. These products are good for snagging flies.

- Purchasing biological controls from companies that specialize in this aspect of pest control. A tiny species of predatory wasp in the Chalcididae family that feeds on fly larvae is a popular choice among horse owners. (This wasp is barely noticeable in the environment and won’t bother you or your horse.)

- Applying fly sprays or wipes to your horse daily. Also, consider installing an automated insecticide system in your barn.

- Dressing your horse in a fly mask, fly sheet, and special fly-screen leg wraps to keep flies from biting him (see Chapter Getting into Gear with Horse Equipment).

The bad news is that you can never completely eliminate flies from a horse’s environment. The good news is that, with hard work, you can keep their pesky numbers in check.

by Audrey Pavia with Janice Posnikoff,DVM