Whatever you decide, be careful not to anthropomorphize. Horses are biologically very different than humans. For a horse, eating some hay off the ground of a dirty paddock the main risk is parasites. For a healthy adult horse on an appropriate deworming protocol, the risk is probably not a huge deal. It’s offensive to human sensibilities, because for humans the health risks of a comparable situation involving human feces would be different and much more serious.
But, as anyone who has kept horses can tell you, if you put some hay out on mats, I can guarantee that the horse is going to pull half of it off and put it in the mud anyway. If you use a hay basket or other type of hay feeder, I can likewise guarantee that the horses will pull half the hay out and put it on the ground. If you put the same hay out in a clean spot in a clean, grassy paddock, the horses are going to spread the hay out and poop and pee on it, right then and there. Foals, and sometimes other horses, deliberately eat the manure of other horses.
Everyone likes to see (or imagine!) a tidy, idyllic farm with green paddocks and no mud or manure. But that’s just not reality of any farm that turns horses out.
Not to hijack the thread, but in winter, my horse likes to take a couple flakes of hay, push it around to make a “bed” and then he lays down on it to take a morning nap. Then he gets up and eats the hay. :lol:
Hey, at least he eats the hay! My girls do this too, only they will never lower themselves to eat their bed afterwards. I throw a lot of reasonable bed-hay away and would be thrilled if they’d snack on some of it.
My horses are at a higher end barn north of Boston and even they haven’t been able to keep ahead of the paddocks and run outs this year. It’s just been brutal. We get snow, then heat, then rain, then flash freezing with -15 degree nights. Either everything is frozen into solid mounds OR the top two inches melts in these 50 degree days and trying to drive anything over them ends in either massive ruts or vehicles getting stuck because you have a layer of muck over an ice sheet. They do the best they can but yeah, my runout is a frozen, rutted mess of poop slushy and I don’t expect that to change until the spring thaw. I’ve been there for years and that’s just how it is in the bad winters. Winters like last year, where it regularly gets above freezing and we don’t get much precipitation, it’s better but you deal with the weather you got.
And if you’ve never worked in a barn in the winter, it’s an experience. EVERYTHING takes twice as long. Drainage pipes are frozen, so changing water involves dumping the buckets into a wheel barrow and wheeling it way out back where the resulting ice slick won’t kill anyone. The main water lines in the barns are turned off (after it froze the first time), so refilling involves turning on one spicket, pulling the hose out of the heated tack room, filling up the buckets, draining the hose, then draining the spicket pipes. Seriously, what normally takes 20 minutes now takes over an hour and it’s all heavy, freezing, wet work. And if I had to prioritize worker’s time between spending that hour picking run outs (as much as they could) or making sure all the horses had fresh water when they came in, the paddocks lose.
I have yet to see a barn in New England that both turns out the horses all winter and has clean paddocks come Feb on a bad year. It’s just the nature of work up here.
So, you’re mad that one worker doesn’t have time to do EVERYTHING on the farm every day? Why don’t you go out there with a fork and a wheelbarrow and help out if it bothers you so much? You should probably do some shopping around and find a different barn. Its obvious that you aren’t going to be happy there.
I find that first time horse owners are a bit like first time parents… everything has to be by the book and top of the line (at least for those who did their due diligence and researched horse/child care).
OP, this is NOT a criticism. If I had unlimited time, energy and money I WOULD run my barn differently. But as it is, I do the best I can with what I have and in return offer board at a safe facility for a reasonable price. Horse care is all about give and take.
To give it some perspective, I remember reading that this place is $600/month, so that’s roughly 30/day that you are paying someone to take care of your horse. Minus assumed facility costs (using mine as comparison, yours might vary) of $15, and labor to feed/turn in and out/blanket, etc (assuming roughly half hour per day) and labor for stall cleaning that’s Probably around $10. Which leaves $5 for the labor of cleaning pens, if they haven’ already filled their day.
Would you clean pens for $5? Otherwise I see a board increase in your future.
good luck with your new Horse! It is a learning experience, for sure!
I think you should be easier on the OP. This has nothing to do with being a first time horse owner needing everything to be “top of the line”. She identified a reasonable concern and brought it here to discuss.
The difference between a first time horse owner and a seasoned one is that the latter will realize that BO/BM’s don’t always follow what is right or what is in their contract.
This issue isn’t IN the contract. It wasn’t even DISCUSSED. That’s kind of the point.
A seasoned horse owner recognizes what their priority list is for their boarded horses. They ask about those items, and make sure promises regarding those items are contracted. A seasoned owner recognizes that no boarding barn is going to be a 100% match with everything they want.
A novice owner makes assumptions about services, doesn’t ask the questions, doesn’t get priorities in the contract, expects a 100% match with how they expect their horse be kept. And then gets upset when the barn doesn’t line up a week/month/year down the road.
(Caveat: broad strokes here, obviously there are outliers from both camps.)
I read it more that people are cutting the OP some slack for not realizing how things can work and how having your first horse means you are just entering the learning curve of deciding what you have to have versus what you can give up when shopping for a horse boarding barn.
I’m not reading 6 pages of replies, I just wanted to add:
As a horse owner who has my horses at home, in a cold climate (Vermont), I do try to pick the winter paddock daily but when it’s -22 degrees and dark when I get home from work, sometimes the paddock doesn’t get picked clean - 1) because I don’t particularly feel like freezing to death, and 2) because sometimes the poop is so frozen to the ground you’d break any tool you tried to use.
So, I do what I can and what I don’t get will wait until spring. As temperatures get warmer, I pick every day to stay on top of the poop/snow thaw.
My suggestion to you is, feel free to volunteer to clean the paddocks if you think winter poop cleanup is so easy.
I would move your horse as soon as you can. You are new to horse ownership. Consider this a lesson learned.
Be sure to vet future barn prospects to make sure that they have adequate staff and that their idea of “good care” is actually good care. Just a few things are:
Well managed pastures/paddocks
Clean, well bedded stalls
Access to clean, non-frozen water 365/24/7
Free choice, good quality hay 365/24/7
When you board, you have to determine what are the deal breakers. More often than not, what is available in your area and what you can afford are the biggest factors.
Frozen water is definitely a deal breaker, but every facility is going to have something you probably would do differently. Where I live, our winters have been really, really wet the last several years so the runs attached to the stalls turn into a horrible soupy mess. The horses are turned out during the day so they are not stall bound all day and night, but mine can’t because she has a torrid love affair with another mare and has seriously hurt herself as a result of chasing other horses off and losing her marbles when her lover was taken from the field. I asked the BO if we could get some gravel, and I manually moved load after load after load into my horse’s run and then bought mats to protect the gravel. The BO doesn’t charge enough to cover doing this as part of boarding… It is just a fact of life.
I would suggest manually doing what you can’t tolerate yourself. This is how this facility is run and if you can’t do the things yourself that bother you, I would suggest looking elsewhere.
Speaking from experience, I can tell you that the question of “well managed” paddocks is not as simple as it seems. For example, you might drive up to a farm and see lovely, clean, non-muddy paddocks in January and think, “Oh, perfect.” But realistically, horses are VERY hard on their turnout areas in winter. In many locations/climates “well-managed” paddocks are a flapping red flag that horses are simply not getting turned out.
Managing paddocks is not straightforward. A BO has several choices. First of all, a BO can use their regular turnouts all year, just accepting that the fields are going to get trashed over the winter, and then deal with the expense of repairing erosion, seeding, etc. come springtime. Many barns do this, but it is expensive and labor intensive and usually requires resting the pasture anyway. Alternatively, a BO can use sacrifice paddocks, allowing smaller areas of the property to be “sacrificed” during the winter in order that the main pastures can rest. This is pretty cost effective, but comes with it’s own issues–overcrowding, parasites, the area being sacrificed to the point of being a mud pit, etc. Creating a sacrifice area that won’t turn into a mud pit can be done, but that’s expensive. Another option which a lot of barns do (it seems to me that dressage barns are the biggest offenders here) is to keep horses stalled when the weather is wet. IMO, this is a solution that is preferred by a lot of owners (pretty paddocks, horse nice and clean and dry in it’s stall), but has the largest negative effect on the health of the horse by increasing colic risk, etc. Horses tolerate dirty, muddy paddocks better than lack of turnout, IMO.
Some farms have enough land that they have less of a struggle maintaining turnouts. However, even farms with enough land/larger turnout areas have struggles–high traffic areas like gates and watering areas are always a pain to keep passable/decent. Getting hay (and/or water) out to larger, more distant paddocks (not every large paddock can be next to the barn) also can be a struggle in muddy or icy/snowy weather when a tractor cannot be used.
One other thing to be aware of is, if you pick pastures/sacrifice lot when there is mud as well as manure, you end up digging out a lot of dirt entirely inadvertently. Which means water collects in the low spots you have made, producing more mud. Which means you are removing that which might turn into grass in the spring. Which means you might be spending $$$ bringing in dirt after shoveling it out. I had boarders/friends who used to clean up their horse pen and then rake every last bit up into a pile for removal. The potty-part of their horse’s pen ended up about 6 inches lower than the other pens until I could finally get them to see what was going on. !!
We didn’t have snow and freezing manure piles in southern California, where I had my small stable, but mud is mud, and at some point in the winter, you leave it and pray for the spring. I do believe it’s important for horses to have a place to go where they can get dry (a high spot, a stable stall, something like that) but there are countless horses in the world who don’t have that and who survive just fine. The stall you keep cleaning. But the mud, or in the case of some of you here, the frozen ground? Pray for spring.
If you live somewhere where it’s possible to actually pick poop outside in the winter, well, that sounds lovely. We have layers of packed snow alternating with layers of frozen poop with a coating of ice. All that melts into a disgusting mess reliably every year in March. Then we wait for the ground to thaw because it freezes about 4’ deep. It has to dry out enough before the BO dares to venture out in the tractor to start pushing all that slop around. It’s sort of like Monopoly: the only way you get from winter to spring is passing through mud season. Red Mares nailed it early in this thread when she said that it was highly unlikely your horse is going to die from standing in poop. Add to that mud.
It’s interesting to watch them find the good footing. They think and look and sniff. My gelding is one of a handful of pasture boarders out with the BO’s horses. I want him outside - it’s better for him to be moving around. There are days I have to hose his legs on the way in to ride. He doesn’t get scratches, occasionally a little thrush. They have access to high areas that drain well, where the round bales are set out. I’m willing to put up with all this because otherwise board would be unaffordable trying to outfox Mother Nature.
