i have a 30 year old stallion, still in good shape, has a little arthritis pain. He rinses his mouth in his water trough. I feed him alfalfa pellets since he started having trouble eating regular hay. I went to the small auto fill buckets but i still have to clean it twice a day. Any suggestions???
Have you tried offering more than one trough/bucket? I know people who do this because they have a hay dunker. Put one bucket near where you feed the pellets and another in a different location. You will still have to clean the one bucket more often, but there will be an additional source for clean water for drinking.
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Do you add water to his feed, make mush out of it?
Then he won’t be dunking his mouthfuls and wasting much of it in the water bucket.
We had one gelding we got out of a bad situation that, vet thought, was mid 20’s and would dunk his senior feed, until we noticed and added water in his feed bucket.
Worked great, no more dirty water to drink.
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I vote 2 buckets, or bucket for dunking + trough and soak feed.
Mine has one exclusive dunking/mouth swishing bucket right beside her hay feeder and soup/mash tub and another beside it which is slightly further away from her eating area. Her drinking bucket stays clean and the dunking bucket does the job of dunk/swirl right where she is most likely to want to do it.
The soup/mash prevents a lot of swirling/dunking, but she dunks some of her hay and is generally a messy eater, so the dunking bucket works well without wasting feed - it just gets gross lol
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Could he have a bad tooth or a diastoma that is packing food and his rinsing makes it feel better?
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After you have his teeth looked at and floated, would he would allow you to rinse out his mouth for him? I’d use a 600cc cattle drench syringe with water and flush the mouth out like the dentist would.
yes, he is very docile, thinks he is a puppy dog not a stallion. I will do that thank you.
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I agree with the suggestions to have a bucket for dunking. When my horse used to be on stall board he’d dunk his hay in his water. As soon as we gave him a dunking bucket, the other one stayed clear. If pre-soaking the pellets isn’t practical, you could also hang a plastic cup in his stall so the barn staff could take a cup of water from his bucket and dump it on top of the pellets when they feed.
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