I don’t do night checks.
Simply because my workshop and office are in my barn and after dinner I am usually there with the horses until midnight. Then I turn off the barn lights and walk 200 feet to the house. I feel like I am making up for the decades before I retired when I had to board horses a 60 mile round trip from home.
Super interesting… I’ve seen a few people mention night check; adding in hay and water like it’s a special thing…. Isn’t that the whole reason for night check? I mean night check to me is to hay and water again and of course eyes on the horses but to me night check is to hay and water… color me confused.
Some barns I’ve been in and other people I know just do a walk through for night check, just to make sure things are ok. But they don’t feed and water is just if they need it. For me, night check is the set 4th hay feeding of the day. But I only have 3 so it doesn’t take long.
No but I love your avatar!
My most interesting night check was the pony who rolled and got cast literally while I was throwing hay for her next-door neighbor. She was lucky that she didn’t roll five minutes later when I had finished. Luckily was just a large pony, so was easy to get right with no damage done.
Cameras are great but they still haven’t invented one that can do the night check hay and water.
Well, yes, at our barn there is a final water check/watering and a final tossing of hay. Also a final stall pick. which is useful because we mostly know the horses’ habits, so know if there should be poop where there is none.
Some of the hard keepers get a late night snack, and there is always the possibility of giving meds if they have to be spaced out a certain way.
The smaller the horse and the bigger the stall the higher odds of getting cast. You can put an 18.2 draft horse in an 8x8 stall made of chicken wire and pallets and he’ll be fine but a smalL pony in the world’s cushiest horse mansion will be stuck in the blink of an eye.
Is this why my horses, when turned out in the indoor, inevitably choose to roll against a jump standard or the wall and not the 10,000 square feet of free, unobstructed space? 
That was my point. Who just does a walk thru and DOES NOT throw hay and top water.
10 years of 2-3 horses at home (now I board). Findings included open stall doors, a mini mule that also opened the feed room door and ate half a bag of chicken feed, a few gas colics, a senior Arab with choke, buckets smashed by someone taking a roll, and a horse that decided to stand out in the rain turning snow and get really cold. That last one involved walking with coolers and blankets in the snow for an hour until he warmed back up.
I always tossed the last bit of hay, as needed, and checked blankets and water.
I appreciate that the friend that now keeps my retired QH for me does night check. He’s sensitive to gas colic and she’s caught it early a couple times. The time he seemed the worst off she gave banamine and I drove out and slept in my car so that she didn’t have to get up to check him overnight.
Around 10:00 PM, I found a horse violently shivering even though it wasn’t that cold out. He had a 102.5 degree fever and had been vaccinated the day before so I gave him banamine. He was fine by 11:00 but I stayed out until midnight to be sure.
Casting is proof positive that this earth is not one of intelligent design 
If it’s a pony mare it’ll be stuck and holding hostages.
I kept hay in front of my horses 24/7, and they always had enough left from the evening feeding when I checked on them last thing at night. I had a heated automatic waterer that they all shared. I just turned a flashlight on it to make sure it was filling correctly, and in winter stuck my hand in to make sure the heater hadn’t failed. So no, didn’t have to throw hay and top water.
If it was snowing, I did have to make sure they could get from the sheds to the waterer. I had one full size mare and two pony geldings. If the mare didn’t make a path for the ponies, I needed to do it. She was good about making a path for them. I can’t remember having to shovel at night too often.
Rebecca
Some colics. One required surgery but horse pulled through. A couple cast horses. Lots of escape artists including catching random loose pony at a show when I was leaving night check for my horses.
Right off the bat, a caveat: not my barn, not my horse, not my choice of stable management. I was paid to do night check (check horses, top up water, throw extra hay if necessary) at a barn I was boarding at.
I found a 2yo colt with his halter clipped to his window grate. 2yo colt was wearing the halter at the time :o Thankful he was a pretty level headed Standardbred in training and not any of the other goofy creatures it could have happened to. Oh, wait, none of the riding horse owners allowed their horses in stalls wearing halters, and even if they had, they would have done the clip up the right way (against the face) so it couldn’t get caught on a window grate, or anything else in their stalls or on anything in the pastures.
Earned a few more grey hairs in the few minutes it took me to figure out how best to extract the horse without causing damage to either of us!
In the few years I did that little job I also found a few other run of the mill things - stall doors not fully latched, outside door not fully latched in winter :o lamenesses in old horses (abscesses usually), minor eye injuries, etc. And one degloving injury in an out 24/7 horse. That was nasty. Although the horse would not have died from it if left overnight, it was definitely an emergency vet call to get it patched up and healing as quickly as possible.
Night check is never wrong. In a well-managed barn, 99+% of the time, you should find horses munching and nothing out of the ordinary. But that tiny micro percentage is worth boring yourself to tears doing it every. damn. night. of. the. year.
I’ve had the opposite - failed to find something I should have. I was doing night check at the barn I boarded at and my horse was lying down, picking slowly at his hay. He loves sleeping though, lies down several times a day for hours, will eat his hay and grain lying down, etc, so it wasn’t that unusual for me to see. The next morning 5am I got a phone call he’s colicking, ended up having surgery later that day and is doing fine now years later but I still beat myself up over it.
Our horses are not fed in the middle of the night as all are on controlled diets to keep them from gaining weight (easy keepers being Morgans), they have multiple water sources …they do sleep at night however.
We use the the cameras to check on them and view the rats, if any
Don’t beat yourself up. He was acting normally and he may not have been colicking at the time you were there. Turn those bad thoughts into good: Someone was up at his hour of need and he got help.
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