Preparing your horse for those winter months - Part 1

Despite it only being September, now is the time to start preparing your horse and its surroundings for the winter months.

Yes, it seems a depressing thought that winter is just around the corner, but if you prepare early you can make those cold, wet and dark days a bit more bearable.

Hopefully these tips I am about to give you will help you through the days where you're emptying frozen water buckets and your hands feel like they are about to drop off.

Winter months are a challenge for both horses and their owners. Unfortunately winter means daylight is short and nights are long. Whatever region you live in, you can guarantee you will receive rain, rain and more rain. For those that are particularly unlucky, snow will also get in the way. Extra care and attention is needed by our much loved four-legged friends during winter months and sometimes it can be very time consuming.

More time and attention is needed by horses during the winter, they require extra rugging up, sometimes more feed and often bringing in from the field earlier than usually required. Should you feel you cannot tend to these extra needs then you may want to finding a good livery yard than can offer assistance. For example, if you work until 5.30pm most days, it is usually pitch black at this time. Horses will often need bringing in before this and livery yards will be able to assist with something like this. 

Riding:

Riding in the winter is no different to summer months but owners will need to consider roads being icy and horses catching a chill.

Most owners wanting to still ride throughout the winter look at clipping their horses depending on what type of work they will be in. Often those still in hard, competition work will have either a full or hunter clip. For sweaty ponies only ridden at weekends, then a trace or blanket clip is much more suffice. Clipping your horse will help prevent it from getting a chill if you're planning to work him hard still. They are very much like us and get very warm when being worked, but then feel the cold once they stop. If you don't clip your horse it will sweat up and in winter the sweat will take much longer to dry, sometimes resulting in a chill occurring.

Often riders find riding in the snow a liberating and exciting experience. Whilst its fun to ride around in picturesque scenes like snow, you must always beware. If the snow is deep and compact you cannot see what is underneath it. There could be anything from ice to holes underneath that is masked by the snow. Also, snow can become compact in your horses hooves that can damage tendons or cause them to trip. If you are planning on riding in the snow then avoid roads and stay in an arena where you know the ground underneath is suitable. Also take precautions like putting grease in your horses hooves to stop the snow compacting.

Buy extras in:

Be prepared for road closures due to snow or heavy rainfall by ensuring you have plenty of everything in. Prepare yourself by purchasing extra hay, feed, bedding and anything else you may need in. I am sure we aren't the only ones last winter that found ourselves snowed in due to heavy snow fall over a series of days. Once the snow hit we were stuck with it for weeks and thankfully we had well prepared.

Body heat that is generated by eating and digesting forage like hay will help keep your horse warm. Avoid under feeding by weigh taping your horse and then working out how much hay/haylage and feed he needs. Putting weight on during the winter is much harder for horses than during the summer. Most recent nutritional recommendations are that a horse should receive 2% of its body weight in hay (or some form of forage) per day.

Turnout:

For many, turnout in winter is limited due to the fields getting very wet and ruined. If you don't want to use all of your fields during the winter to 'mess' all of them up, then why not nominate one field for everyone to use on a rota? That way it saves all fields becoming boggy with mud and water. Should you need a drier field throughout the winter or have a horse with mud fever that needs to stay out of boggy areas then you can use one of the fields you saved. Now would be a good time to start thinking about which fields you're going to save.

Top tips:

- Over the next few weeks think about what condition your horse is in. Does he look a bit lean or like he could do with a little more weight? If so, start to think about putting it on now before the weather gets cold.

- Insulating water pipes if you have automatic water drinkers may stop them from freezing during the colder months. When we first installed our automatic drinkers we didn't even think of this and they were constantly freezing then bursting, spraying water everywhere. Put insulator around the pipes and it will stop them from freezing.

- Make your horses bedding deeper to ensure they aren't standing on cold concrete. This can be uncomfortable but also can make your horse colder.

- Start investing in some tennis balls - these are brilliant to put into water buckets to stop them from freezing and becoming full of ice!

That's it for now, make sure you check back soon for Part 2 and more top tips! If you have any of your own tweet me @FurryMane or comment below.

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Labels: autumn with horses , equine care during winter , preparing your horse for winter , winter , winter with your horses