Horse Manure can be Interesting! – Honest
Written by Hiddenhorse on 24/09/2009 – 12:21 pm -This post is in response to some correspondence I’ve been having on on of the ‘paddock paradise’ websites. It is a site for people who keep their horses on a track based system. The initial issue was raised by a lady in Florida who was having trouble with her horses leaving large amounts of droppings in certain areas of her track and this was becoming a nuisance, especially in hot weather.
Now while it might be rather sad to spend one’s evenings discussing horse manure on a transatlantic basis, really this seemingly simple problem is the starting point for some really interesting discussion and observation about the lives of horses, (trust me! – it is…:-).
If you want to read the thread you will find it here
In my experience horses will leave droppings in one of two places:
- On or near ‘stud piles’ around it’s home range
- In places of abundant food supply
Stay with me here!
Here are some facts about the natural horse. The horse is an animal that has evolved to exploit what I describe as ‘nutritionally poor environments’. That is, it lives a life of travel from resource to resource – on-track and consumes low-grade foodstuffs in the form of fiber. As it moves it also passes manure and urine thus both ‘polluting’ in the short term and enriching in the long term, the home range area. When horses travel together like this they often use ‘stud piles’, these piles of manure are something the horses utilize as a form of (quite sophisticated) communication. Consider the kinds of messages that might be left for other horses.
- I was here
- This is our marker
- This is our territory
- My herd was here
- This is who I am
- This is my level of health
- This is my sex
- This is my sexual state
- This is how many of there are
- This is how long ago we were here
- This is what we found to eat.
And probably hundreds of equally subtle messages we can only guess at. To horses that are traveling on-track, in a nutritionally poor environment, these stud piles form important features of their home range. ( I want to write something clever about a sort of ‘equine newspaper’ but I think that would be too anthropomorphic):-).
I propose that if your horses do live on track, in a Paddock Paradise, and they are traveling around looking for and finding the right sort of food, and they are using these stud piles these are good indicators that everything is working well.
But there are times when horses do not travel on track and that is when they have no need to do so. In the wild these situations would occur naturally during wet periods such as springtime or early summer when the grass is growing in abundance. Obviously there would not be much point in leaving rich environment to go and look for a poor one, so temporarily, horses will abandon their tracks and linger in one place while the going is good.
There are many examples of this behavior, one particularly easy one to visualize is the life of the horse’s African cousin the zebra. In the wet season small family groups of animals will temporarily join with other groups and even other prey species such as antelope or wildebeest to for giant mega-herds, they will then exploit the environment fully both consuming the resources and polluting/enriching the environment with their consequently rich, (not to mention frequent) deposits. Once the areas resources have been consumed there is little incentive for the animals to stay together and the herds will disperse and return to life on track. The food that they have consumed was far in excess of their normal requirement, plus the fact that they didn’t need to burn much fuel to get it, so the excess energy is laid down in the form of fat as an insurance against inevitable hard times ahead and as an investment in breeding the next generation. This situation is something that will happen to all kinds of herbivore species as part of the normal yearly cycle. Let us call it the ‘campingphase’.
To bring this back to our horses living on track, consider the factors that are needed to create the camping phase:
Horses living on track in nutritionally poor environment will temporarily abandon the track and thus the consequent movement when they find:-
- A nutritionally rich environment, with abundant resources
- An area of finite size -and thus finite resources
- A large number of other prey animals – mega herd (in human terms a ‘high stocking rate’).
- Time: the phase will last until the resources are consumed and the land becomes over polluted with the resulting urine and faeces.
At this point mega-herds naturally break down and horses return to life of movement on-track.
So what is happening with my friend in Florida? Well, it turns out she has a herd that although it is provided with a track, it is one that is actually quite small for the number of horses, – she has seven horses on a two acre track. A track system is usually pretty tolerant of high numbers of horses but like anything else it has an optimum number, the mistake I think she is making (in a nice way) is that she is providing a lot of easy to find food thus creating a nutritionally rich environment.
In a nutritionally rich environment horses don’t move much – why would they?
So we have all the elements of the camping phase happening here and her horses are not traveling as they should do, – simply because they have no incentive to do so. The signs that they are lingering too much in one place are well… obvious.
Jamie Jackson in his book Paddock Paradise mentions this phenomenon and its implications several times. In chapter two – In Search of the Natural Boarding Model (page 54) the story of the Peruvian Paso Fino Ranch (1984), in this example the ranch had 300 -400 horses definitely a high stocking rate and a mega-herd but presumably with abundant food. Their feet though showed they were not moving naturally, in other words, they were in a permanent ‘camping phase’.
Another telling example is the story of the ’20,000 Acre Horse Rescue Ranch’ (Page 56). Here there were over 100 horses ranging freely over 30 square miles. This was also a dry, arid and the horses were fed a high fiber diet of hay. Despite all of this the horses hooves were far from perfect because the horses lacked the movement derived from natural (traveling) behavior.
Finally the story of the BLM Wild Horse Corrals at Litchfield (1986) Page 57. This story tells us the most because here were hundreds of horses and burros in a huge area just standing around doing nothing and waiting for the food to arrive. Once again we have a high number of horses, a nutritionally rich environment, and as much as you can eat twice a day.
What these three stories tell us is that it is not really about the amount of land we give our horses to roam over, it is about the incentives we give them, on the land that we have, that stimulate natural behavior. As humans we frequently offer too much food because we can’t bear the thought that horses might feel the uncomfortable feeling of hunger. Yet hunger, in the sense of the desire to find food and sex in the sense of the desire to reproduce are the two most powerful motivational forces in nature. Don’t get me wrong I’m NOT advocating starving horses as a management tool!! But I am saying don’t just hand out food, wake up your horses natural desire to seek out food, don’t make it too easy and have your horses go and look for what they need, if only because you will spend less time with a shovel in your hand.
One last thought, we can liken the Paddock Paradise / track system and traveling through a nutritionally poor environment to the life of humans who live in the country, – rural folk. Life is a lot less crowded, you get a lot more exercise, and perhaps, yes life is a little harder but ultimately it’s much healthier.
The horses living in a permanent camping phase existence are a bit like those ‘city folk’. They live a life of ‘overcrowded ease’. It is certainly a nutritionally rich environment so they take a lot less exercise because they don’t need to and they are definitely not as healthy oh yes… and they spend a lot of time complaining how bored they are.
Don’t make ‘city folks’ out of your horses. Get a track system.
No need to move on
Paddock Paradise, always moving from somewhere, - too somewhere
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Tags: Abundant, manure, nutritionally poor environments, nutritionally rich environments, Paddock Paradise, stud piles, track systemPosted in Paddock Paradise | No Comments »
