Blanket Coverage for Your Horse
- Topics: Article, Winter Care
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It took you a good 20 minutes to get dressed to go out and feed this morning. Over the long underwear, the turtleneck, and the thermal socks, you still had to add three more layers, and struggle into your snowmobile boots, the better to wade through the snowdrifts. You hurried through the process, worrying that the voice on the radio was calling for record low temperatures and that your critters would really be feeling the cold. But as you waddled awkwardly across the yard to the paddock, the sight that met your eyes (in the woolly slit between scarf and hat) made you shake your head in wonder. For there in your field, looking like a gang of happy yaks, were your horses, gathered around the hayrack with snow piled on their backs–watching, with mild amusement, the Michelin Man approaching them, and obviously none the worse for wear.
Comfort Is Relative
Horses naturally are far better adapted to cold than we poor, hairless humans. It’s not so very surprising when you recall that the natural habitat of ancestral equines, such as the tarpans and Przewalski’s horse, wasn’t the Arabian desert but the steppes of Russia and Mongolia. There they developed a supremely efficient means of insulating themselves against extreme temperatures. Left to their own devices, most horses will grow a thick layer of winter hair, which, because of the direction of its growth and its natural greasiness, easily repels moisture (you might have noticed this yourself when you gave your horse a bath–it takes quite a bit of water to get him wet!). This coat provides a weather shield so complete that horses can stand in the middle of a howling storm until ice forms on their backs, without the skin ever becoming chilled. The individual hairs stand up in cold weather, trapping an insulating layer of warm air close to the skin for extra snugness.
Thick manes and tails provide further protection. In particularly chilly conditions, horses turn their rumps to the wind, so that their tails blow between their hind legs, protecting the relatively delicate skin of the perineal area and the inner thighs. Furthermore, if given the chance, horses will lay down an insulating layer of fat under the skin in the fall. Finally, because horses have a comparatively small surface area compared to their large body size, they are very good at generating body heat and tend to lose it slowly. That’s a disadvantage in summer, but a boon when the winter winds start to shriek
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Tony Anderson, DVM
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