Ok, I recently got an ottb gelding and I swear he is purposely pooping in his water bucket, feed tub etc. I have tried his water bucket in all corners of his stall and he still poops in it a couple times a week. He eats out of a rubber feed tub on the ground and if I don’t wait around for him to finish eating and remove it there is a good chance it will be full of manure when I come back. He has actually also peed in his feed tub a few times as well. Out in the pasture they have a poly ring hay feeder with a net and he poops in there as well once the bale is eaten low enough. I don’t think he is scratching on these things, he has no rub or scratch marks and is up to date on deworming etc. I swear he is doing it on purpose wtf 
help! Lol
I have a mare that does some of this. I kept moving her hay net around her stall, and she kept following it pooping & peeing on the hay that would fall beneath it 
She’s improved a little bit in time, but I’ve also just gotten better about finding ways to keep her out of her feed & water. Her hay is in the run off her stall, in a net, clipped into an old trough.
She’s never pooped in the water, but I’d hang the bucket outside the stall in a heartbeat if she did. She swims in the pasture tank, so I’ve removed the middle board and placed the tank outside the fence. They reach through to drink.
Sometimes they poop in buckets because they’re hock sore (or other hind end soreness) so that’s worth considering, too.
Good luck, this is SUCH an annoying set of habits!
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One of my geldings used to do this. It drove me crazy.
My dad told me to leave the poop. Just fill the water bucket, dump his grain right in there with his poop.
I really didn’t want to do that, because I wasn’t sure he was doing it on purpose. But he swore it would work, so finally I did.
It worked. He hasn’t done it since. That was years ago. Guess cowboys know a few things 
I now think it might be some sort of dominance issue. I think They do it when they are insecure about protecting their food. Horses don’t graze near poop piles. I think it’s the same idea with the grain bucket. It’s all mine because it smells like me.
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How long have you had him? Did he come in with these behaviors right away?
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Interestingly stallions make tidy stud piles and so can studly geldings. So poop is definitely used as a marker by male horses. It’s interesting to me what make behaviors persist, disappear, or get wierdly twisted in geldings, and how they differ.
For instance some spend their whole lives playing bitey face with each other like yearlings.
I feel too like OTTB start stall life so young that they don’t get to develop tidy habits. The messiest mares in our stalls with runouts I’ve seen have been OTTB. The other mares are much better about pooping outside or if they are locked in for snow days, still being mindful of where the poop lands.
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Yes, the favorite past time of bitey face. My geldings love that game. It’s usually followed by the game of rear and see who is tallest, and then possibly bitey leg; the fun game of pretending to bite the others’ knees.
I haven’t looked after many OTTB mares (I don’t know why. OTTB Geldings are so popular, but I rarely see OTTB mares at barns) but the ones I have were all fastidiously clean. Of course, that’s a very small handful that I’ve taken care of so maybe my sample size just isn’t big enough.
I did however, take care of one OTTB gelding who was the messiest horse on the planet. He would wreck every ounce of bedding put in his stall. Churn it all up, poop and all, until it was one disgusting mess, and then pee everywhere. We had to strip his stall every day. The owner said he had always been that way. He had 24h access to a run out too; he just preferred to go inside and cause chaos.
The geldings, playing their favorite games. Amazingly even after years, they have never injured each other.
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I wonder what would happen if you left an empty shallow feed pan in the stall for him to poop in. Perhaps he thinks he should poop in a pan. If you give him one maybe he will leave the others alone.
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had a gelding where I board who did this poop thing: In feed tub. In waterer. thru the bars either into my horse’s stall or into the aisle. Manager did some things like covering the mounted feed tub and auto waterer. Hanging water buckets outside the stall window a bit to the side. Fed from ground feeder and a hay bag. That solved two of the problems but the thru-the-bars thing never got stopped.
Funny thing, my horse (a stallion) loved this dude, they played lip games often, and though I found it gross, he did not care at all about the other poop coming into his stall.
Hang the water bucket higher than his anus.
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About 4 months, he has done these things since he arrived
The worst part is really him pooping on/in the poly ring round bale feeder outside and ruining the hay for everyone lol I might have to pull him from the pasture into individual turn out.
I have a stable herd of 3 geldings and a donkey. Toppy is the boss, he’s comfortable in that role and not a jerk. On occasion I stall everyone and everyone has a specific stall. He happily goes in his stall and absolutely destroyed it. In 12 hours every poop is trampled and spread. He pees everywhere. He walk through his hay. He doesn’t poop in a bucket other than that it’s just shy of graffiti and stealing the robe and overflowing the toilet.
It’s just him. He’s a pig.
