From: Helen
Hi Jessica,
Like everyone else, I really appreciate your website and all the practical & caring advice you give.
We have a little 2 stall barn. The stalls have drains in the bottom, then covered with 18" of 3/8"- rock, with 3/4" mats over that. Each stall opens into its own 24' x 60' mudless paddock. We used bedding pellets, about 6" deep. This works great for my Appy, who is very tidy and very rarely urinates in the stall; but my Thoroughbred is a whole other story! His stall is often very wet by the end of each day, and we are constantly replacing the pellets. It's getting very expensive!
I'm wondering is there is another type of bedding that might work better for him? Something more absorbant perhaps? Or should we just be bedding his stall much deeper? Or maybe there some kind of mats out there that urine will leak down through?
Also, is there any way to train a horse to urinate elsewhere? We work full time so we can't keep an eye on where he goes all day.
We're composting our manure and need to keep that in consideration as well.
Any advice you may have would be much appreciated. Cheers, Helen
Your system sounds like a very good one, but every once in a while there's an extremely wet horse that pushes ever a good system to its limit - and sometimes beyond. With built-in drains and that much rock in the stalls, it seems to me that it should be easier to keep your Thoroughbred's stall dry. I'd say that the first thing you should do is make sure that there is no drainage problem (such as a blocked drain) in the Thoroughbred's stall.
The next thing I would do would be try to ensure good drainage through the rubber mats. If they are good quality and fit closely and tightly together, they won't typically drain very well! In a stall with a clay floor or some other cause of poor drainage, this is a plus - the urine is absorbed by the bedding and can be removed, instead of pooling under the mats and creating a horrible ammonia smell. But in a stall that's been designed and built for great drainage, urine pooling under the mats shouldn't ever be a problem, and your aim should be to let the urine drain away as quickly as possible. You might consider drilling a few holes through the mats to encourage more rapid drainage. If you have a large horse that urinates copiously in certain areas of the stall, and the drainage is SLOW, it's quite possible for even deep bedding to become saturated. You don't need to drill so many holes that the mats resemble Swiss cheese (or, for that matter, the sort of mats that are used in wash stalls), but even a few holes per mat can make quite a difference.
The pellets themselves would be the next thing to look at. I like pelleted bedding, but I've tested four different brands, and discovered that they aren't all the same. Some are much more absorbent than others. Some break down more quickly; some barely break down at all unless you carefully wet them down when you first bed the stall; some are very absorbent, and some... aren't. You may want to experiment with different brands of pelleted bedding and find out which brand works best for you.
I wouldn't advise you to bed the stall more deeply, just because when the pelleted bedding gets too deep, horses can slip and slide when they try to get up, and they can become injured.
You might be able to train your horse - or at least encourage him - to urinate elsewhere if you put just a very thin layer of bedding in his stall, and put a thicker, more absorbent pile of bedding (used bedding is fine) outside in a corner of his run. Horses prefer to urinate in areas where the urine won't splash their legs, which is one reason they'll tend to come in from their drylots or runs and urinate in their stalls, on the bedding, whenever the footing in the drylots or runs is baked (or frozen) hard. If they discover that the urine is less likely to splash when they urinate outside on a useful pile of old bedding, they will sometimes form a new habit. I know of two desperate owners whose horses didn't "take the hint" when the stall bedding became thin and a pile of soft, used bedding appeared outside. The owners resorted to removing ALL their horses' bedding for a week or two - they piled it into wheelbarrows and "parked" the wheelbarrows in the aisle. If I remember correctly, one horse eventually changed his ways and began urinating outside the stall, and continued to do so even when his owner began replacing the bedding. The other horse, alas, didn't seem to mind where he urinated, provided that there was bedding in place. He returned to his old habits as soon as the bedding returned to his stall.
Good-quality, absorbent pelleted wood bedding is extremely absorbent and very useful for stall-cleaning and for composting, because the proportion of manure to bedding is so high. It can be almost as effective as clumping cat litter, in that you can remove manure and the occasional wet spot without having to remove much of the bedding at all. Unless a horse is very wet, or spends all of its time in the stall, the pelleted bedding usually absorbs urine and dries out again. On nice spring and fall days, you might consider closing the door between the stall and the run, so that for 8 or 12 hours at least, your wet horse doesn't have the option of walking indoors to urinate in his stall. This will allow the stall bedding to dry out, and may help your horse develop a new habit of urinating outdoors. Good luck!
Jessica
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