Hi all,
I had a new boy come in for his stall rest days. We do stalls 3x a day for those on stall rest but this guy will pee through shavings like no other. It ends up trashing the stall because there is so much.
Straw is not an option as we are on mattresses. I was thinking of putting pelleted bedding under the regular shavings?
Hemp also sounded appealing but I’m not sure I could mentally handle not removing the urine for a week or more.
Any other suggestions out there? TIA
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This is what I do. It works great. Just dump the pellets in the typical pee spot under the regular shavings. They soak up the pee and clump, which makes removal easy.
I’ve had the same experience, using pellets in the usual pee spot. I’ve also used peat which worked well.
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My input is not about the bedding, but a sidenote: make sure the horse doesn’t have a salt block he may be licking heavily due to boredom. My neighbor had a pink salt rock hanging in her horse’s stall that he licked moderately. When horse had to be stalled for rehab, he went to town on the it and was drinking more and peeing a LOT! She finally realized what was going on and took the salt out for a few weeks. Just an FYI…
No salt in his stall. We learned that lesson!
Thanks for the input about the pellets. I’ve never used them since we usually go for fluffy with the rehabbers.
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Another vote for pellets in the wet spot under shavings. My boy drinks a lot and pees a lot when stalled overnight (I do give him loose salt in his grain because I want to encourage drinking in cold weather). He makes his wet spot in the middle of his stall and then lays in it, so his blankets were all crusty and reeked of urine. I add about 2 quarts of pellets per day, and it’s made a big difference.
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My horses are generally free to move in and out of their stalls, and I use shavings for bedding. However, one of them is currently on hay restriction, so needs to be stalled overnight. I have changed his bedding to pellets entirely. Super easy to clean and not much waste. If you put a decent amount down and wet as you place them it makes for a very cushy and comfortable surface.
Normally I find pellets too dusty for my taste, but in this situation they are a great solution.
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I have used “Best Cob” which is a pelleted form of ground corn cobs in wet spots. It worked great. Then it went up to $10 a bag and I get 10 cubic foot bales of shavings for $4-$5 so I just added more shavings.
And for some reason my Cushings pony will go on these salt block binges and drink and pee up a storm.
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IME some horses will eat the ground cob pellets (as will some very greedy beagles) so just be aware that can be an issue.
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we have a few messy boys…we mix pellets and shavings all the time. The pellets absorb and make less waste (but tend to get dusty and have less fluff)…so a blend of the two seems to work out well for absorbing better but also providing some cushion.
Another vote for wood pellets in the wet spots. I tried the corn cob but to me it got a bit smelly. I hate cleaning straw so shavings and pellet mix works best, plus I can adjust for humidity.
Peat moss.
For a while I had a colt in my back yard inside Charlotte, NC (I had to get a horse “dog tag.”) Before I brought him home I talked with my neighbors explaining how I was going to use peat moss as bedding, and how it is SO GOOD at preventing that dirty stall smell and how it soaks up all the urine so it did not run out of the stall. It also cut the number of flies because it controlled the smells from the stall so well.
One neighbor eagerly asked me to dump my used peat moss bedding over the fence into his back yard so he could use it in his gorgeous garden.
The peat moss soaked up all the urine. The peat moss absorbed the smells from the urine and manure. For my colt at that time where I was peat moss was the ideal bedding for us.
I also had to use a LOT LESS peat moss to get a wonderful, soft and springy bed for my colt.
I use pellets for my slob of a gelding. Makes cleaning easier with the clumping pee spot. I also do loose salt as he would ignore his salt block so to make sure he gets enough to drink I add it to his feed. I don’t even bother wetting the pellets, by the next day, he’s pulverized them himself. Saves me a step.
Isn’t peat moss really heavy, especially when wet?
Yes, wet peat moss (which traps most of the liquid) is heavier that wet sawdust or shavings which let a lot of liquid escape.
But the utter convenience of having just the one discrete area of wet peat moss that does not leak down to the ground under the bedding made it SO MUCH EASIER for me to muck out the stall. The manure also stays pretty much on top of the bedding.
Peat moss makes a lovely soft bed for the horse with about half the volume of bedding. I spent a lot less energy overall mucking out the stall which helped make up for the heavier pee place.
And your manure pile will not stink as much, plus you should be able to find people who are super willing to cart it away for improving the soil in their gardens.
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I may have to try peat moss. The pelleted bedding is working very well under my shavings. I bed DEEP, like 8-10 inches of shavings minimum so anything that absorbs more; makes my life that much easier.
I’ve also heard that hemp is very absorbent but the thought of not removing urine daily makes me cringe a bit.
I used peat moss once for a foundered horse. I used the bales you can buy at Home Depot/ Lowes. It was EXTREMELY dusty. I ended up with black dust on everything and the horse started coughing and I started wheezing. It was very absorbent, made a cushy bed and grew awesome tomatoes but the dust in the air did not work for me.
we have one horse on shredded straw, it is much like pine flake shaving… the bales of field straw are a real pain to do anything with except strip the stall completely, but this shredded stuff (which in compress bales like pine shavings) is actually really easy to work, no dust at all.
Now if he would stop pretending he is a cat burying poop under the straw it would be helpful
The other horses are on pine, pellets are used where they pee… sort of mix pellets out of the bag into the shaving with a pile of pellets in the specific pee spot.
Now if all of them would follow Bonnie to the outside pee spot to pee before coming in the barn it would be great…she will not come in until she goes over to pee first.
Talk about weird habits…horses’ bathroom habits are as individual as they are. Dante has a designated poop spot in every paddock/pasture but pees anywhere. Eddie and Six cannot eat grain unless they go outside and pee first. Like your Bonnie, they will only pee in the stall if left in more than 8 hours. The other three go wherever they feel the need.
My old Stallion was the best ever. He would poop in the back right hand corner of every stall or paddock. He would also pee on in the exact same spot every time. It was a breeze to clean since you could just leave the muck bucket in the poop corner, put pellets on the pee spot and bed the rest in shavings that just needed fluffing on the left side. I miss him…
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our first lead herd mare made all the others poop in the compost pile, if one didn’t it was a hell of battle as she made it known to unknowing horse that they did wrong, who then rarely ever made that mistake again
We showed a lot in the Class As… a seasoned horse just did not poop in the show ring or the warm up …it was unbecoming and beneath their status to them, I guess.
We had one win a championship, the state vets were there for drug tests… so escorted the horse to the stall and every time the vet attempted to capture a urine sample the mare would stop to look at him with an evil eye… told them to pull a blood sample
and then there was our Foxie horse who won at another show and even though the vet escorted the horse to the stall got into a disagreement with us saying we switched horses on him as the horse in the stall could not be 17 years old. (Foxie was in great shape as she was used in multiple disciplines including doing 55 mile competitive trial rides)… we had to get the show management to come to the stall to identify the horse as being the horse on the papers.
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