Serta or Tempurpedic?
Posted by Mikki on Apr 19 2006 at 10:57 pm | Tagged as: The Barn
At some point - preferably before you get your horse, but at least soon after - you will have to decide what kind of bedding you want to use for your horse. Of course your horse’s comfort is an important consideration, but since, unlike your dog’s bed, this bedding won’t just be slept on - that’s right, horses are not “house broken” - there are other considerations too, such as absorbency and siftability (is that a real word, or did I just make one up?). When you greet your beautiful, elegant equine companion in the morning, you will see that he made a small project for you to work on that day. More likely, two or three projects. He probably even has some stuck to his face. Sweet.
There are several options for horse bedding, beginning with the base - the stall floor. Our barn floor is just plain old dirt, but some barns have permanent flooring. You can also put in rubber floors - we are looking into that. They are easier to keep clean than dirt, and more comfortable for your horse than dirt or cement.
On top of whatever kind of floor you have, you need the multi-purpose bedding. This should provide comfort for your horse and absorb whatever he may leave in there for you to muck out. There are basically three choices: straw, wood shavings, and wood pellets.
Straw is the classic barn bedding. Upsides: It’s cheap and easy. I think it’s pretty comfortable too - we used it at first, and Valentine never complained. Downsides: it’s not very absorbent, and it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak…when you go for the poo, you get a lot of straw too.
We haven’t used wood shavings for Valentine, but we do use them for our goat, Joey. They work great for Joey, because he hardly ever uses his little house as an outhouse, so one pack of shavings lasts forever. Upsides: They smell great, and cedar shavings, at least, naturally repel fleas. Downsides: We didn’t try these because we decided they wouldn’t be cost-effective. You’d have to buy a lot to fill a stall, and replace the soiled bedding with new shavings at a pretty good clip.
We finally settled on wood pellets. There are several brands out there. When we were researching this topic, the brand we found was Woody Pet. They don’t sell this brand anywhere nearby, but we checked at our local feed stores and co-ops and found a similar product sold under different names, such as Equine Pine and Eagle Valley ABM Advanced Bedding Management. We also asked other horse owners and the people at the feed stores and co-ops, and the consensus seems to be that this stuff is the best thing since sliced bread. So we shoveled out all the straw and put in six bags of wood pellets…
…watered them down to fluff them up per instructions…
…and presto! Soft, fluffy, absorbent and sweet-smelling bedding! Which equals a sweeter-smelling horse. If you love on your horse like I do, you’ll appreciate that.
Equally importantly, the stall cleans up faster and easier than ever before. The sawdust - which is what you end up with after you wet the pellets down - sifts right through the fork and all you’re shoveling out is poo. The urine soaks into the sawdust until the sawdust has reached maximum absorbing capacity, then it clumps together and you can shovel it right out. My big sweetie always pees in exactly the same place, so I just shovel that spot out every couple of days and add more.
Yea to woody pet
Its the bestest yet a bit pricy to start with. But if you ever need a subsitute….
Most people round here use pine shavings/sawdust by the truckload tho. They are $125 bucks a one ton dump load delivered from a guy I know that does Dixie Stampede and the theater where I work , or you can get ‘em practically free if you pick them up yourself lots of places.
Straw isnt used here unless you have a mare about to foal generally. Since we arent close to places that farm oats and the like it is pricy here IMO actually compared to say, KS or something.
Just a note on cedar shavings. Some horses will react to the shavings alergically. Not all, will react; and not all will react right away, but may react after being exposed for a period of time. After knowing others who have had problems, my opinion has always been that it’s not worth the risk. Pellets, straw, or pine or fir shavings are a better choice. One vet bill and you may ask yourself why you took the risk. Personally I am a “pellet believer!”
I have used both pellets and shavings. Personally I dislike the shavings - cost wise. I clean my horses stall out daily (my mare is on 2 months stall rest after colic surgery) and it needs to be stripped in at least 3 days! We need about 4 bags to make the stall comfortable. The pellets were nice, and seemed to last longer. But I have been looking for other alternatives, such as Dry Stall. Anyone know about that product? Informative post, thanks!!
I do the lumber sales for a mill in Northern Quebec, and we are looking at bagging and selling our wood shavings. I see that wood pellets are becoming more and more popular. In your opinion, would you switch back to shavings if the price of pellets got crazy (which does not seem to be the case, at present, mind you)? There seem to be a lot of producers of pellets on the market, but I wonder if they are making money at the prices they are offering. How long can they continue at the lower prices?
As Darlene says, cedar shavings are bad for horses.
My understanding is that the horses react to the natural poisons in the cedar (much like bugs do) so the cedar slowly poisons them when they breath in the vapors and dust.