Shelter for a Pregnant Horse

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Neil Draper and we're going to talk about shelters for your pregnant mare. Now this shelter is eighteen by twenty-one and it's got good open end for ventilation. You want to make sure you got lots of ventilation for your horses. Their respiratory system cannot take stale, dusty environments or having ammonia from the urine in the stalls so you'll want to keep the stall extremely clean. Change the bedding. Now the bedding can be out of several different materials. Good clean grass, good clean straw, there's companies that make shavings for horses out of wood chips from pine to cedar chips. There's pellets that absorb the horse's urine and waste and keep the environment drier. The straw and the other shavings will do the same thing. And you'll want to spread it out evenly over the ground and make it about three, four inches thick so it's a nice comfortable bed. And be able to come in and keep it clean, take out the wet areas with the manure fork and haul it off to your manure pile. And of course you'll want to take the manure out of the stall and to keep the stall as dry and clean as possible, and usually you'll have to change your shavings depending on your horse and your size of your stall. You know from maybe a day or two to you know three or four days depending - a large stall of course you'd be able to keep it cleaner and not have to change the shavings as much as a small stall. And as I said, this stall is eighteen by twenty-one and this gives a horse plenty of room to lay down and roll around without getting caught in the walls. Now you can see these walls are solid, so the horse can't get its feet through the walls. You'll want - if you can a more solid area so your horse doesn't get pinned down to the ground by putting its legs through the bars of the fence and having the colt and we've had this happen, be born on one side of the fence and the mare is on the other side of the fence. So if you can, it's good to have an area where you can contain the colt and mare in. But it's not a necessity. Now if you have an open field and the horse is free roaming and it's pasture and it's clean, then the horse can have it out in the pasture just fine. As a matter of fact, they'd probably prefer it that way. But where our pasture - this area is more dirt and we don't have the pasture, we're going to try to contain the mare in here with the bedding down on the ground to keep this area clean and nice and safe for the colt."