From: Lauren
I am going to subscribe for a free trial membership to your newsletter. I work for a non-profit that cares for severely abused children. We run a ranch therapy program with a variety of animals, including 10 horses. Hence the interest in your newsletter. Question No. 1: Can you donate a subscription to our organization? I'm sure my ranch manager would be glad to share stories or information if that would help. We had to cut $450,000 from our operating budget this year and there is very little money for subscriptions. Let me know. Question No. 2: I need to find established guidelines addressing barn cleaning, especially with regard to stalls. BAsically, our ranch has been cleaned three days each week, but our business manager wants to cut cleaning (meaning removal of manure) back to one day per week. Our ranch manager has asked me to find information that might help her substantiate her request to not cut back on the barn cleaning as it is a health hazard for both the animals and the people. Let me know if you find/have anything.
Now, regarding the stable management policy you asked about - you and your ranch manager are right to be concerned, because the horses are already in a bad situation and someone is proposing to make it much worse. Clean, dry bedding isn't an option - it's a "must" for horses in stalls.
Stalls should be cleaned at least once daily. This isn't just "for pretty", it's so that the horses can stay comfortable and healthy. The buildup of manure and urine doesn't just make unattractive messes and smelly wet stalls, it also contributes to respiratory illnesses and is the most common cause of thrush.
There are some times when stalls can be cleaned less often - for instance, if the horses that normally occupy a block of stalls are turned out in a pasture for a few weeks, the stalls would not need to be cleaned during that time, because they wouldn't be used during that time. If a horse has a stall with an attached run, and tends to use the run rather than the stall as a toilet area, then the run, not the stall, would require more cleaning. If horses are in their stalls for only a few hours a day, and in a pasture the rest of the time, then the stalls will not get as dirty as quickly, and can probably be skepped daily and cleaned twice weekly (although the pasture will need regular cleaning!). Manure and urine removal are a constant concern when you are managing horses, particularly when you are managing horses that are confined to stalls, and there's just no way to avoid the issue.
The bottom line is really very simple: If a horse spends any time standing up and lying down in a particular place, whether it is a stall, a run, a pen, a paddock, or a pasture, that horse needs a clean, dry surface to stand and lie on.
Horses produce, on average, forty to forty-five pounds of manure each day. They produce several gallons of urine during the same period. All of this has to go somewhere, and if the horse is confined to a stall, that "somewhere" is into and onto the bedding. The manure and the urine-soaked bedding must be removed at least once a day if the horses are to remain sound and healthy.
You mentioned that at your barn, the stalls are cleaned only three days a week instead of seven - this means that the horses, if they spend more than a few hours a day in those stalls, are undoubtedly already suffering as a result.
Horses in stalls, like babies in cribs, are completely dependent on the adult humans around them for their care. To someone with no understanding of the needs of horses or babies, it might SEEM (on paper, at least) that cleaning a stall once a week, or changing a diaper once a week, would be "more efficient" and would mean a saving of time and money. It's not true. A stall that is well-cleaned on a daily basis does not take very long to clean on any given day. A stall that is allowed to become filthy and wet for a week will require a great deal of time and effort to clean, as hundreds of pounds of manure and soaked bedding will have to be removed, the wet spots in the stall flooring repacked or treated, some sort of drying agent added - and then the stall will have to be filled with fresh bedding.
Any book on basic horse care will mention stall-cleaning and the importance of keeping stalls clean and dry at all times. If you get a pocketful of change and go to your local library, you can probably photocopy a page or two from every horse-care and horse-management book on the shelves - and they will all say the same thing. You'll end up with fifty or a hundred or a thousand (depending on the size of your library's horse-book collection) variations on the same theme: Horses need clean stalls, and "clean" means KEPT clean on a daily basis, not allowed to turn into cesspits and then shoveled out once a week. It's a management issue, and a very basic one. Horses have needs that must be met on a daily basis. You can't water a horse once a week or feed a horse once a week - even if you offer it a week's worth of water and food every Saturday, you'll quickly have a dead horse. You also can't lock a horse in a stall with a week's worth of manure and urine and soggy bedding and expect to put everything right by shoveling out the stall at the end of the week.
Tell your business manager that bad stable management isn't a good way to save money - and that, in fact, it will NOT save any money. Over the long haul, the expense of thrush medication, the extra staff time needed to apply the treatment once or twice a day, AND the necessity to keep the stalls clean and dry as part of the treatment will add up to much more than the cost of simply keeping the stalls clean and dry in the first place, as part of good stable management.
If money is a problem, I understand that, but the horses can't be allowed to suffer as a result. Instead of the once-a-week stall cleaning idea, which won't represent a financial gain anyway, why not have an "efficient stall-cleaning" day in which all of the people who clean stalls can learn to clean stalls well and thoroughly and efficiently, making the best use of their time and the most effective use of the bedding. You didn't mention what form of bedding your program uses, but you may find that another sort of bedding is easier to clean or that less of it is needed. Some people, for example, try to save money by using sawdust instead of shavings - but sawdust is not very good bedding, and the people who clean the stalls find out, very soon, that they are working much harder and using much more bedding to get the stalls clean and dry. Sawdust is less absorbent than shavings - and it contributes to respiratory diseases in horses. Good shavings, or some of the better-quality pelleted beddings available, will cost more than sawdust, but that's just the initial purchase price. The price difference will be more than balanced out by the quality of the bedding AND the fact that you will not need to use as much bedding.
Here's another thought. When stalls are cleaned daily, it is a relatively simple and quick task to remove the manure and soaked bedding from the stalls, and to add bedding when needed. There is never any need to strip the stall down to (and into) the top layer of the stall base in order to remove all of the stinking, urine-soaked, manure-laden bedding. When stalls are stripped once a week instead of being cleaned daily, the work is much harder and takes much longer. Ten minutes of daily stall-cleaning adds up to an hour and ten minutes each week - to provide a horse with the clean, dry stall it requires. Stripping a stall completely and refilling it with fresh bedding can require an hour and a half, or even longer, depending on the size of the stall, the type of base (mats, clay, dirt, roadpack, gravel?), and the endurance of the person who is staggering back and forth to the manure pile, pushing a heavy wheelbarrow loaded with soggy bedding and manure. It's not particularly healthy for humans to breathe that air, either - but they're still better off than the horses that are exposed to it day and night.
It's good to care for abused and neglected children, and animals can be a very important part of therapy for such children. But don't focus on the children themselves to the point at which you find yourselves participating in the abuse/neglect of horses - in the cause of helping the children. All children learn from what they see and from the way the adults in their lives behave. Abused children are particularly likely to pay attention to what you DO (rather than just listening to what you SAY). If the animals in your program are treated well and with respect, the children will absorb this understanding. "No human or animal should be abused or neglected" is a wonderful message to convey. "It's okay to neglect horses, they can't do anything about it" is not a good message, and it's not a message that any therapy program should ever convey, even inadvertently. I'm sure that nobody involved with your program would ever INTEND to send such a message, but dirty stalls send a very clear message. Clean stalls send a message too - they say "We care about doing what is right, we take good care of our horses, we care about their health, we understand that horses need clean, dry bedding and air that doesn't reek of ammonia, and we see to it that our horses are comfortable and treated well." THAT's the message you want to send. It's reassuring for humans, especially children, and most especially abused children, to be able to see for themselves that there are places in the world where it's not necessary to be grown-up, important, powerful, or articulate to be treated well. That message comes through clearly when you show them that the helpless animals in your care are treated with respect and kindness, and that's a message that any therapy organization should be proud to convey.
Jessica
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