Basic Horse Care Series from InfoHorse.com
How to Have a Healthy Horse Stall
Is your horse is going to spend part of their day in a horse stall?
Horses are often brought in at night and let out to pastures during the day or they are in during the day and let out at night. Of course many horses are out almost all the time and that’s great but we are going to think about the horses that spend part of their day in a stall in this short article.

Horse stalls come in different sizes and are built from a variety of materials. Stalls can have concrete floors usually covered by rubber mats and some floors are purposely left as dirt or sand.
The floor of the horse stall is almost always filled with a bedding of straw, saw dust, wood pellet horse bedding and wood shavings manufactured for this purpose that come in a variety of textures. Depending where you live there are going to be other options as well.

One thing all stalls have in common is once you have a horse in the stall you are going to have to manage the results. Manure and urine need to be removed daily or even more often if we are going to provide a healthy environment for our horse.

The purpose of the horse bedding is to provide some comfort to the horse and to absorb moisture, particularly from urine. We will need to provide stall bedding that is dust free for our horse’s respiratory health. We want our bedding to be easy to pick and remove the manure and wet bedding. Dusty bedding needs to be removed.

Horse bedding will absorb the wet spots so our horse’s hooves don’t. Remember the saying “ No hoof, no horse.” Clean bedding helps prevent issues like thrush, white line and softening of the hoof. Horse stall bedding also provides comfort for our horse and helps prevent sores developing from rubbing on the unprotected floor.

Once the bedding has become wet it has done its job and needs to be removed and disposed of. Eventually even though we do our best cleaning, there will be a time when the stall should be completely stripped of the bedding to ensure bacteria and the small pieces of organic material are removed. It might be best to put the stall-stripping job on a schedule of weekly to monthly. This schedule will vary depending on use, bedding material and general environment.
Clean stalls will also reduce the number of insects especially flies.
Our goal is a healthy, safe and comfortable environment for our horses.

Enjoy Your Horses!
Bob Pruitt for InfoHorse.com

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