What is an acceptable length of time for a horse to be on a Eurocizer?
Recently my horse was forgotten on the Eurocizer and was on it for five hours. I see other horses left on for an hour. Boarders are not allowed to operate it, only grooms.
If the barn were to adopt a protocol for making sure what happened to my horse never happens again, what would that look like?
Other than being hot and tired, my horse suffered no ill effects. But this still should never happen.
Well, there’s two questions here.
What is the right length of time?
But also, how do you stop grooms from making crazy mistakes? Leaving a horse on the exerciser for 5 hours is like forgetting to feed hay one might or forgetting to fill up water or bring horse in at night. It doesn’t really matter what the guidelines are, if your staff are idiots or overworked stupid and even dangerous errors will happen.
I am sure you can look up guidelines on the product website and they will vary by horse, rehab will be different from building stamina. My guess is an hour walking is fine for a healthy horse.
I am guessing that a Eurocizer is a horse walker.
I would treat the same with some care. He will probably be muscle sore. That is 5 hours he didn’t eat for and used a lot of feed for energy so I would up his feed a little bit. I would only put him on the Eurociser for about 15 minutes for a couple of days. I am only guessing I have never even see a horse walker.
I wouldn’t up his feed or anything, but maybe lighten the work for a day or two.
Our horses go in the walker for 30-60 min. I think this is appropriate for an average healthy horse. I’ll put my horse in (allowed if no one else is using it) for 20 or so min every now and again in the winter while I’m doing whatever around the stable to encourage more movement in the winter.
No one has ever been left in it. There was one horse in it and the particular staff member in duty had to begin a lesson so he asked someone (familiar with the horse) to go fetch her from the walker. So people are pretty mindful here.
I really don’t know how it can be prevented aside from not allowing the horse to go in the walker at all. 5 hours is a longgg time! That would lose my trust. I’m not really sure how to address that. The staff could use a timer or alarm, but they could also disregard that or turn it off and forget. It could also be a one time thing…or not. I’d probably just ask for my horse to be out in a paddock or something instead of the walker. Then again, my horse doesn’t really need the walker and he’s lazy so he wouldn’t miss it!
A timer on the electrical outlet where the exerciser is plugged in, set to 60 minutes, will stop that.
Like the ones you use in your home except it would need to accommodate the higher amps/watts of the machine.
Wow, that’s a pretty big screw up. I’d be pissed.
What type of program was it set on? All one direction? Was it reversing directions? Just at the walk or was it jogging him during that time, too?
I think you already know the answer that 5 hours is not an acceptable length of time. I don’t think an hour is unreasonable as a maximum if they are mostly walking.
I’ve never seen a eurociser with a plug… usually they are hard-wired with a control box.
Some ways to prevent this from happening is to actually program it to stop after X minutes. I’ve had it happen where I was busy and mistimed it so the horses were left standing in there at the end of the program— not that I recommend letting them stand around unsupervised in there, but touch wood, I never had a problem. In busier barns where it is running more or less all day, they often have a dedicated merry-go-round manager.
WOW!
That is some kind of mistake.
A friend cutting horse trainer said that exerciser paid for itself the first year he had it, not even counting horses were thriving on the regular exercise with it.
In regular horse walkers, hard to miss that one is out there walking on it.
European equizisers, maybe you could miss one was still on?
Installing timers, if nothing else to give horses a break, say every 15-20 minutes, would be a great idea and would eliminate no one keeping an eye on them by necessity, to turn them on again after the break.
Glad your horse was ok.
WOW!! Not much to add but major sympathy for your horse, @Bristol Bay - maybe extra peppermints next time you see him, huh? Poor guy…
I’d say an hour is doable for just about any horse in working shape, assuming this is a “dry” eurocizer and not one of the water ones, as those are quite rare outside of rehab facilities. If your guy was on the eurocizer for five hours at a walk, I expect he’ll be pretty sore but none the worse for wear after a few days off… In your shoes I would be livid… even more so if it was a water one as those require so much more effort.
There definitely should be a “merry go round manager” as Texarkana said… that’s a pretty big error on your barn staff’s part, I hope they are being extra kind to your horse and spoiling him today. I would also be in favor of installing a timer, but of course, that’s not something you can do but the barn can…
Still… pretty big F up.
This happened two weeks ago. The most important thing at the time was to get him hydrated. It was 80 degrees that day and he hadn’t been clipped yet. The next day we just tack walked around the property (no circles!) and he was fine the day after that in regular work.
The most disturbing thing is that no one noticed, or were hands off, it’s not my horse, etc.
I think it does run on a timer, and changes direction every ten minutes or so. Someone had to keep turning it back on.
An hour sounds long to me, but that seems to be the consensus.
It’s hard to imagine how that would’ve happened as yes they usually have a safety feature to prevent it, if anything it might shut off and the horse is left standing there, but it won’t run on its own for five hours. So someone did reset it several times?
Yes, I believe so.
Besides a lot of furrowed brows and “I’m sorry this happened,” nothing has been done.
In the short term, he’s not going on the Eurocizer again ever. In the long term, I may need to move him.
At least they did tell you, so you could take care if there had been any consequences, like lame or colic, etc. you would know why.
Shadier places would not admit to anything.
They really should also make changes so that can’t happen again.
A snap with a string to hang on your pants or jacket, a colorful bracelet on your wrist, every time you put a horse out there.
A simple cheap loud alarm clock, that doesn’t take a second to turn on when you put a horse in there, would help until a better way is found.
Mistakes will happen, but that one is a puzzler.
As long as it doesn’t mean there is other odd stuff going on there, it may just have been a real stupid mistake only, not that the place is not being managed right.
Or is a sign management is going downhill, if they are not responding right to what happened.
So sounds like they were cycling horses on and off and lost track of who was on there? Could just be a random error OR indicative of seriously over worked staff. If staff are overtaxed then that issue needs to be addressed. Eurocizer mixup just a symptom.
Well if he was left on as other horses were added and removed and the timer restarted, perhaps some kind of checklist system like maybe a dry erase board to name who all just went in. Erase the name when you go to fetch that horse. I suppose you could add a clock in time if there are horses on different schedules but the more details required the more likely laziness will omit them and then the whole system falls apart.
Poor guy.
It was the stable manager who put him on there and then went home early. This may be why there has been no come to Jesus meeting about it, because everyone knows it was his doing.
No one told me anything. I discovered him myself.
Who were the people that kept turning it back on?
All the other grooms who use it. There are three sets of grooms, one each for the two H/J trainers, and one who work for the stable itself and serve the casual boarders like me and the other trainers. So my horse was not under the supervision of a specific trainer. Any of the casual boarders can request their horse go on the Euro, and the stable grooms will do it. They are all under the direct supervision of the stable manager, the one who made the mistake. It’s a cluster F. No one is in charge of everything, and the person most in charge, the stable manager, is a joke.
The plot thickens. Today I asked around and the gist is that none of the trainers’ grooms heard anything about the Eurocizer, and the stable grooms had a be careful warning. They said no one had talked to them beyond that.
I kept asking the stable grooms about that day and the one who left him on there and forgot him admitted it. So it wasn’t the manager! It was doubly upsetting because it’s a groom I’ve known for years and am fond of.
Finally, I ran into a friend who is in the know but hasn’t been riding lately hence not around, and she said they did talk to everyone, but the guys were afraid to tell me. I wasn’t informed of the investigation by the barn management because maybe it’s a personnel matter? I’m still unclear on that point.
Although the incident was taken very seriously, I’m still not satisfied that any real change will come from it, although that remains to be seen.
Five hours is too long unless you’re trying to condition for the Tevis Cup or something. JK.
I have heard of horse left on hot walkers overnight by accident. They lived.
Still, I’d be pretty pissed off. An “assistant trainer” once left an ice boot on my horse overnight. She didn’t want to take the time to put in him the cross ties so she did in in the stall and then forgot. He removed it at some point and I found it the next morning. I was annoyed about that and don’t consider it as bad as the eurosizer error. Ultimately I left…
Hm. I cannot recall if ours stops after x amount of time. I know it changes direction, but not sure about a shut off.
It sounds a bit like a cluster as far as communication and organization go. If I was okay with the stable otherwise on a day to day, I’d just tell them that my horse no longer uses the walker. If there are also many other issues stemming from this barn manager and groom thing, I’d consider looking at other stables, but I know that’s easier said than done as there are not always better options.
Still would bug me that no one could be straight forward about it.
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