Cleaning a stall takes detergent and manual labor. | Photo: The Horse Staff

Cleaning out the garage. Sorting through all the “stuff” in the attic. Shampooing the entire house’s carpeting. What could be a worse assignment? All of those tasks require lots of time, hard work, and are few people’s entertainment-of-choice for a weekend. Most horse people would rather saddle soap every saddle and piece of leather they own, or even wash and wax the horse trailer.

There is one horse-related duty that ranks right up there (on most people’s scale) with the above dreaded assignments–cleaning and disinfecting stalls. Who wants to strip totally every stall in a barn, wash, disinfect, and re-bed them all? That is a lot of labor most people would gladly put off for a nice trail ride. Plus, it’s not really necessary, or is it? Put yourself in these situations:

You are the owner of a boarding stable with 35 horses, primarily pleasure horses used for trail riding. After some horses return from a weekend ride, two horses develop profuse diarrhea. The veterinarian suspects salmonellosis and two days later confirms the diagnosis