FREE RANGE STABLING
Distributing Hay Feeds for More Exercise
Over the past few months, the horses stabled on our Paddock Trail 1 have become incredibly efficient energy savers. You rarely saw any of them move at all. This will probably always be a problem if you offer hay feeds from large racks. Despite this, the horses in the other herds always seemed to spend some time away from the racks, dotted across the available space, resting, sleeping or playing.
The entire PT1 herd, on the other hand, could nearly always be found standing around one of the two large filled hay racks.
There are three large hay racks. As we had to switch over to round bales, we were only able to fill 2 racks at a time, as otherwise the hay would stay in the racks for too long, leading to a significant loss of quality in wet weather conditions.
This herd featured an unfortunate combination of several aspects:
The leading mare (dominant and with a tendency to bitchiness) had left the herd. There was a discernible lack of security on the one hand (the herd preferred to stay huddled together), on the other, the general atmosphere was extremely harmonious (no one forcing the troops to scatter).
As the horses had become significantly fatter, we used very tight-mesh hay nets for feeding for several months last year. This also led to longer feeding and standing times, which were maintained (from force of habit) even after we switched over to larger mesh nets.
So what was to be done? We tried setting up small hay feeding stations at four additional points (see the image top right, the green circles indicate the latest additional hay stations). The efforts showed promise as on one sample day the herd was tracked via GPS and the results showed the herd had moved an impressive 6.2 miles in 24 hours traveling from station to station.
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We hung a hay basket into an essentially empty covered hay rack
Small hay boxes were placed on either side of the dividing fence in the middle of the trail
We set up a small hay storage area (a hay bale placed on top of a pallet with a protective cover) close to the two small hay boxes to reduce labor intensity for boarders helping stock hay stations