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Winter Enrichments and Activities for Horses
Winter can be a challenging time for riders as well as their horses. Shorter days with inclement weather can make finding time to ride a challenge. Horses confined in paddocks or drylots during winter still need something to do. Increasing turnout time, allowing social interactions between horses, and providing sufficient forage opportunities are enrichment opportunities that are critical to our horses’ welfare.
Winter Confinement
Keeping horses off winter rain-soaked soils or frozen pasture plants is key to maintaining the integrity of your pasture next summer. Soggy soils or dormant plants grazed below 3 or 4 inches simply cannot survive continuous wintertime grazing and trampling. Pounding hooves compact wet soils, which suffocates plant roots and creates more mud. Overgrazing causes root resorption so grass plants no longer have long, healthy roots reaching deep into the soil utilizing moisture and nutrients.
The alternative to destroying pasture is housing your horse in a mud-free confinement area. However, horses in confinement still need to have their needs met: They need to move about freely, have social contact, and be able to access food throughout the day. Even so, many horses in confinement develop physical or behavioral issues such as pacing, chewing, aggression, nervousness, or gastric ulcers.
What Is Equine Enrichment?
Equine enrichment is looking at ways to provide more stimulation in a horse’s environment to benefit their psychological and physical well-being. We all know our horses are smart—scientific research confirms this—so when confining our horses, we also need to keep their personalities in mind.
Here are a few ideas for ways to incorporate enrichment opportunities into confinement areas:
Take-Home Message
Using a confinement area reduces winter’s impact on pastures and improves productivity for the next growing season, which means less money spent on supplemental feed and happier, healthier horses. But confinement areas can be stifling for some horses, lacking in physical and mental stimulus. Providing enrichment for horses in winter confinement does not have to be expensive and can be as simple as adding turnout time with others, providing forage in a more natural way, feeding a new type of feed or occasional treat, or giving your horse a food ball or lick. Or it might mean scheduling extra one-on-one time with your horse. Think outside the box, mix things up, and have fun together – and rest assured that you are supporting your horse’s emotional well-being at the same time.
Written by:
Alayne Blickle
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