Spring horse showers
Posted by Bill on Mar 26 2007 at 05:19 pm | Tagged as: Horse Health
It’s been rather toasty in east Tennessee this past week. We hit almost 90 degrees Sunday. I notice our horses are shedding like a polar bear in Miami so we decided to give them a good brushing, followed by a cool shower. Now we brush our horses in the winter but I have to admit, we haven’t showered them since the weather turned cold. We don’t have the luxury of a shower stall, I didn’t think the horses would stand still for a 30 degree soaking and we simply didn’t want to get wet ourselves when it was that cold outside. But yesterday was warm (hot?) so one at a time, we harnessed both horses and led them onto our grassy green lawn. Let me tell you, they were more than wiling to come along. Poor things. They stare at our beautiful green lawn, full of yummy fescue and clover while standing in the dry dirt of our still-desolate pasture, eating old hay. Any chance to get to that yummy green grass is taken. Moonshine is patient with me as I put on her halter. I let her eat a couple of mouthfulls of grass before introducing the hose. What I do is use a nozzle with lots of holes in it so the water comes out in a gentle rain-like pattern, instead of a full-force, high pressure pattern. I turn the hose on slowly, let her get used to the sound, let her smell the nozzle and then gently introduce the water to her legs and then back. After a few minutes, she seems to forget about it and I’m free to soak her good. Months of dirt came running off. She sure looks purdy now. Mikki even combed her mane and tail. I then took her for a drying walk, brushed her again and let her back into the pasture where later she rolled in dirt to get rid of that yucky clean feeling. 
Valentine was next. He also didn’t seem to mind and also later rolled in dirt. Oh well, at least they were clean for a few minutes!
By the way, some people call it a “horse bath” but to me “bath” refers to dunking in a tub. Our horses are too big for a tub.
What’s your horse shower/bath routine like?
We take ‘em on out and hose them on down.. At first they dance a little and then they love it.. .Especially Picken, my thoroughbred… My endurance horse
I do the same thing. Bring them out and hose ‘em down. Misty doesn’t care for it much, ever and I bought Kola last fall so it hasn’t been warm enough yet to try it with her. The gelding I used to own loved a bath, er shower, he would dance in it and try to eat the water and when it was over he promptly find the dustiest place he could and roll until he was black and no longer grey.
Thanks for the comments, guys. Callie, that’s funny. That sounds like something one of our dogs would do! See, this is why we sometimes think of our horses are really big dogs, lol.
We just got a catalog from somebody (I don’t have it in front of me right now) that shows a horse shower arm for around $130. It’s like those stall arms you see in car washes so you can wash your car all the way around without the hose hitting your car. I’d love to do this in our unused 3rd stall. I even have an idea for provided inexpensive warm water. I’ll experiment and post something at some point.
My gelding that I had was very good about being bathed/showered. But he was also a white horse and never ever stayed clean. All the other horses would always come up with their coats all shiny and clean and then there was my horse, with huge chunks of mud on him. It didn’t seem to matter if it was dry everywhere he would always find the mud! And some of the places that he had gotten mud just would make me wonder about what he would do when we weren’t watching!
I worked as a groom in a big training/show barn before I bought my first horse. They called it a bath, so it’s always been a bath for the horses, but definitely the shower was for me. Don’t know that after all these years I can say I’ve figured out how to bathe a horse and stay dry myself.
I rarely bathe horses in the winter, only for some special event I might be participating, otherwise, I’m like you, when the first warm days come along, I’m hosing someone off. I can’t wait until my beautiful horses emerge from underneath all that hair and dirt. Soon….