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Rockin's Education Center  Basic Horse Care To truly understand a horse, their behavior and needs, it works best to put yourself in their hooves, so to speak. From the perspective of a horse there is safety in numbers. Predators find it more difficult to focus in on their prey and actually capture the member of a herd, so a horse knows instinctively to stay close to other horses. As plant eaters, horses in the wild must travel constantly to find new food sources. This traveling behavior keeps these animals physically fit and keeps their hooves filed down; it also provides them with a variety of plants in their diet. When we keep our horses at a farm we have to adapt what a horse needs to what we are capable of providing. Unfortunately in the past, horses were made to bend to people’s needs without much care or forethought about what the horse might need to stay healthy, both physically and mentally. At Rockin’ Horse Farm, LLC we love our horses and we want them to be healthy and happy, so everything we do to care for our horses is researched and well thought out, and what we have found is that when a horse is well cared for and content they love to do what their human’s ask of them.
What do they eat daily, how much, what treats are OK??
Our horses eat all day long. They are fed grass hay throughout the day, they are given feed two times a day, morning and night, and they also get a small amount of a special hay called alfalfa or peanut hay. This hay is much higher in protein than grass hay and adds vitamins and minerals to their diet. Our feed is high in fiber, just like all the plants a wild horse would be eating. It is made with shredded beet pulp, which is a substitute for grass and leaves, and we add a little bit of grain and seeds for extra nutrition. A wild horse would eat grain and seeds when they could find them, but those types of things would be harder to find than the grasses and the leaves of plants, so we feed them in a much smaller proportion. Horses usually love fruits and some vegetables like apples and carrots; these are great treats for horses once in a while.
When we keep horses in a barn, we must still remember to let them be horses. Horses like and need to be together, so keeping them separate all the time makes them unhappy. Every day horses should be turned out to socialize with the other horses. When they are turned out it is a great time to clean up the messes they left in their stalls. Stalls must be mucked out every day to keep the flies away. Water buckets need to be kept clean and new bedding added to the stalls to make a comfortable place for the horses to lie down at night.
We love horses and love to share information about them and their world, because we are only fearful of what we don't know. Come empower yourself with knowledge! Take lessons, come to camp, volunteer for our Horse Connections program...
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