Written by Jenny Slack
Snow on the ground at Little Bit means, unfortunately, we need to keep the horses in their stalls in the barn until conditions are safe for turn out. This is primarily due to snow balling in their feet, which presents a risk of long-term injury, or the potential to slip on the snow and ice below it that covers the ground of our property. As most of the Little Bit property is gravel dry lot, this frozen ground covered in snow or ice is a significant safety risk to the well-being of our herd.
When we keep the horses in the barn, we need to keep them gradually moving for their physical well-being. To do this we hand walk each horse for 30 minutes per day in the indoor Alvord Arena. Our herd of therapy horses is an average age of 19, and many of our horses are well supported medically and through their regular, low impact workload for conditions like arthritis. Horses are not designed to stand stationary in small spaces, and while our stalls are a good size, they don’t provide the horses the space to walk like they should. We therefore hand walk to keep their bodies moving and prevent health issues such as “stocking up,” which is the buildup of fluid in their legs from being still for too long. Hand walking is healthcare maintenance, but it is not work to prepare the horses for riding.
We are on site every day from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. evaluating site conditions. For both the horses’ wellbeing, and to get our program participants back working with our horses as quickly as possible, we will turn the horses out quickly, as soon as the conditions are safe. It is important that we are cautious, since a soft tissue injury on a horse can take many months to heal, and we want to be mindful of this in our herd of senior horses. We need the snow accumulation to be very low, and not on frozen/hard ground. This needs to be not only in the paddocks, but on the walkways to access them. Once that happens, the fun really starts!
Our horses will have been inside the barn for a few days and be very excited to be outside! They will have excitable, playful, and very exuberant behaviors. We need time to allow them to release this energy, decompress and move around for a few hours at a gentle pace before we can properly start to work them again. Typically, we say a half day turn out is needed before we can start to ride again.
Once the horses are ready to be ridden, our team of schooling riders will then get to work! While the turnout will help, again this is different than the horses processing being in "work mode" and being calm enough for our participants to mount safely. Their energy will still be very high. Our schooling team will then begin a process of free lunging, lunging, and riding our horses to prepare them to be ridden by our participants. This is a process we are well practiced in; we do it every weekend, and at the end of all our break weeks. To prepare our horses after their typical “time off,” the schooling team comes in on Sundays to work the horses, so they are safe to ride. It involves a lot of carefully controlled riding, helping the horses to move their bodies but in a balanced manner; this requires a lot of skill from the team. There will be a lot of work at the trot and canter, and yes, some occasional behaviors such as a playful buck; while that is acceptable (although not preferable) for our team of schooling riders, is not safe for our program riders. Sometimes some members of our herd will require a couple of rides in this process. With a herd of 32 horses, this takes a lot of people and time. We always want to balance getting our participants back on our horses as quickly as possible, while making sure the horses are as well prepared as we can for our riders’ safety. Many of our schoolers are volunteers, and we are so grateful to them for this service, without which we would not be able to maintain the horses for our program riders to mount.
There are some additional factors at play in winter that we also need to consider, such as if there is snow on the arena roof that will melt during the day and slide off. Horses are flight animals and, when a large shadowy lump makes a whoosh noise and falls from the sky next to them, that's scary and will result in a spook in most cases. Again, this presents a safety risk to riders and is stressful for the horses. They are spooking because they are scared. Under conditions like this, we will not put the horses in the Murdock Arena, or the outdoor arena, which is adjacent. The temperature also plays a part in this process as the schooling is not a “one and done process.” All our horses are schooled two to three times a week in normal programming to maintain their conditioning at a level where they are appropriate for our mounted participants to ride. When temperatures are low, our outdoor arena freezes, making it unusable for riding. This means we are balancing schooling the horses to keep them safe for our mounted participants, while also trying to keep our indoor arenas open for our participants to ride in.
We are fortunate to run our program in a location where we only really deal with this situation for a few days or weeks of the year. We have an amazing equine care team of our barn staff and schoolers who are on hand to respond to the needs of our program horses to serve our participants, most of who are schooling on a volunteer basis. We have two amazing covered arenas to serve our large client base, and a herd of wonderful horses, who if we do our part to set them up for success, will continue to deliver our mission alongside us. Thank you to everyone who has reached out asking about the care of the herd and to thank our equine team; we so appreciate it and look forward to seeing you all back soon.
