Interesting. I’ve pretty much always used straw anyway. The best horsemen I have worked for and or been around never use anything else.
http://stablemanagement.com/article/research-update-bedding-horse-behavior-53730
Interesting read,i prefer shavings for bedding stalls,plus i can get it way cheaper then straw. Around here its 5 to 6 dollars a bale for straw,that’s more then a square bale of timothy/alfalfa hay cost.
My stalls are bedded with just enough shaving to cover mats…straws a PITA to clean and dispose of.
EDITED to add my horses are out on pasture 24/7 with run in shed with just mats for flooring,no bedding. Only in barn if really bad weather.
Bedding is very regional. In grain-growing areas I’d imagine you’d have access to lots of straw at a reasonable price. Here in the PNW we use wood products, either compressed pine pellets that expand to sawdust, or wood chips, which can be pure pine or mixed softwoods. People will splurge on straws for mares about to foal, as it doesn’t stick to the umbilical cord, etc.
I stopped using compressed pine pellets on my horse very quickly, as she developed a cough (the sawdust is very fine once it’s released). I stopped using pure pine chips, as she was snacking on them (yum! fence chips!). When she’s had straw in her stall, she has eaten it up as promptly as she eats her hay.
I’m using mixed softwood chips in her stall, and I find the secret for this particular horse is that they have to be very deep (like about a foot). She has deluxe stall mats, so about 1/3 to 1/2 of her stall is bedded, the other swept clean. This is enough for her to lie down and be very comfortable.
She is a very “sleepy” horse, needs to stretch out every day. When I started taking care of her, she wouldn’t sleep indoors at all, only in her small run-out paddock, which is hog fuel (cedar bark and chips, another PNW thing for footing) and well-drained. Even in the snow, in her blanket. After I deep bedded her stall, and there was a big three-day rainstorm, she finally tried sleeping indoors and now she is pretty much completely switched over, which I love. She is “housebroken” and keeps her stall completely clean, so she stays clean when she sleeps inside.
I’ve noticed that horses with well-drained hogfuel runouts will sleep outside much more than those with sand runouts.
When I was a teen, we got ton loads of sawdust delivered from the mills, and bedded our horses very deep, at least a foot, on concrete stalls. They always slept inside overnight. Now that wood-product bedding tends to be bought and used by the bag, people have become much more sparing with the bedding, because of the cost. It is quite typical for both boarding barns and self-board to put down rubber mats (a good thing) but then to just use enough pelleted bedding to capture the urine, and clean it out every day. I can’t imagine any horse getting a good night’s sleep on that!
So while straw might be great, I’ve never used it and probably never will, out here. But I think the main thing for sleeping is depth of bedding. The study doesn’t say how much pellets they used. I can imagine straw feeling more resilient than the same amount of pellets. But I think you can get a nice bed from a lot of wood chips, too, IME.
I think it is very regional in the US. Whenever I’ve been up to the Fair Hill area in MD and PA, there is tons of straw used as there are a lot of mushroom farms that will haul the used bedding away. Growing up out west, there were a lot more pine trees than wheat fields, so pine bedding was much more common.
My current barn beds on pelleted bedding (~3-5" on mats), and all of ours seem to nap comfortably. Now we wet it down initially, so it’s mostly broken down to a pretty resilient base and they seldom make bare spots in the stalls. The study is interesting but I think the key is making sure there is enough bedding down for them to be comfortable in, and maintain it properly.
I can’t tell what the horses were doing when not stalled, or was this for full time stalling? I’m not paying to access the full article 
I would think that would make a difference in how they behave in a stall.
It would be interesting to know how many horses in the study, did they use the same horses for the comparison between the bedding types, how much turn-out were they getting, were they comparing between different barns or was it all the same barn with the same horses and they just changed the bedding?
gumtree- straw is nice where you are because you can get it removed for free since you are close to the mushroom farms.
I am further up in Northern Chester County, you need a pretty big farm for them to come get it. Most people up in this area bed in shavings/sawdust because it is much cheaper, takes less storage space and easier to clean. I don’t miss cleaning straw stalls. I think the sawdust is much more absorbent so the barn smells better.
I just wish the linked article had a lot more details on the study controls. There is so much the can contribute to stall behaviors. I wonder what controls were in place to account for other variables that can contribute to stall behaviors.
[QUOTE=JB;8787938]
I can’t tell what the horses were doing when not stalled, or was this for full time stalling? I’m not paying to access the full article
I would think that would make a difference in how they behave in a stall.[/QUOTE]
Yes, and all those pesky details about how many horses and how much time per bedding …
Strange that you have to pay to get stuff like that.
Straw is expensive where I live. I like it for my old man, but again, it is expensive.
I get straw for my sheep.
I wish I could use it for my horses, but they keep trying to eat it. That is usually undesirable for them for a variety of reasons.
Also, the straw seems to be a little slippery in the trailer, so I put shavings in there.
