Horses and Conservation Part Two
Written by Hiddenhorse on 12/05/2010 – 9:31 pm -The field you keep your horse in is also the environment you keep your horse in. It is the horses home. Ideally it should be where your horse lives all the time, preferably with a group of other horses (i.e. a herd). It stands to reason that everything that happens in that environment will have an effect on the horses and the way the horses interact with the environment will affect the environment too.
I expect you have seen fields with horses living in them, In the UK, broadly they fall into two types. The first type is probably not that far removed from the equivalent of an internment camp for horses. Usually this is the type of thing that you see on livery yards; sterile, rectangular paddocks divided up by electric fences. The horses, will usually be rugged whatever the weather, – God forbid they should ever get wet or muddy! Divided from other horses and only able to interact with other members of their own species over a live electric fence. Imagine what it would be like if you got an electric shock every time you reached out to touch another human being, what would a few months of that do to your brain, let alone a lifetime? If these horses have any access to wooden post and rail fencing, you will notice that they have eaten most of it. It always makes me wonder what terrible crime these poor horses have committed to be incarcerated like this and to ask when, if ever, they will be released.
More happily, the second type of environment usually looks a bit of a mess, the grass is eaten down and there are a lot of weeds but at least these horses usually have access to shelter and hedgerows and can move about a bit, if they want to, although usually they don’t. Often though, there is more than one horse so that they can be a part of a herd and thankfully, they more frequently escape the relentless rugging of their jailbird cousins.
Neither environment is ideal, in my opinion, by accident, the second option is much better, but still far from perfect. I say, ‘by accident’ because in both cases the owner has given little or no thought to what is a suitable environment for these animals as horses. Ironically it is the owner that puts his or her horses in the rougher environment that is sometimes likely to be charged with ‘neglecting’ their animals.
I once saw one of those programs showing the work of, well-meaning but basically pretty ignorant ‘horse policemen’. He was called to look at one of the weedy environments in which there were several ponies, who had a great pasture of mixed, bio-diverse plant species and a lot of trees which they were happily eating from. Apparently, to his annoyance, the ponies looked in really good condition, even though they didn’t have any obvious feed buckets, they seemed happy. ‘Well’, he said, ‘they haven’t got any food, but they don’t seem to be suffering, there is nothing I can do’. He returned to his van shaking his head cursing the system that wouldn’t allow him to prosecute the neglectful owner.
I nearly threw my shoes at the TV!
If he had been able to see things from the horse’s point of view these horses were living in an environment full of food, almost everything they could see they could eat and because they were fibre digesters they could extract energy from it. This was nothing to do with neglect or even animal welfare this was human anthropomorphism. My doctor has advised me not to watch this type of nonsense in the future, – bad for my blood pressure.
So if neither of these environments is ideal is there something better?
Well, yes, there is.
If we start thinking as our field being the animal’s environment, we should start by thinking about what the horse needs from it’s home. First and foremost, as always, we must understand the horse is a prey animal, consequently it is a herd animal so it’s main emotional need is to be able to feel safe, and the thing that makes horses feel safe is the presence of other horses, so our environment must be a herd environment. The horse, because it is a prey animal, is also a flight animal, so environmentally it needs lots of space to distance itself from threats. The horse is also a fiber digester (lots more on this coming in later posts), it is a creature that goes to look for it’s food, so in this sense, we could say it is a foraging animal, consequently, we need to construct an environment in which it can forage for high-fibre food. While were at it what about the horse’s need for mental stimulation? Horses are relentless travelling animals, 20 miles plus every day in the wild. Not just aimlessly wandering either, they travel around a ‘home range’. The constantly changing scenery of that area it contains enriches their mental experience and knowledge. Knowledge such as: where food is, where water is, where minerals are, where shelter from prevailing weather at different times of the year can be found. Horses need to know safe places to rest up and where it isn’t, they need to have reliable knowledge of where the best escape routes are, this type of experience is something that horses spend a lifetime gathering. Horses when they interact with other herd members frequently play and they need to feel safe to do this. All this stimulates horses mentally. How much stimulation does the unfortunate (but pampered) prisoner in the internment camp get?
By now you are probably thinking, ‘Blimey, all I need is sixty square miles of virgin countryside to keep my horses on’. Not so!
The Solution:
There is a way that you can add lots of ‘horse environment’ to any field of any size or any shape without buying or renting a single, extra square inch of land. Because of this you can also add extra horses to make that herd, – again, without buying more land or significantly increasing your costs. There is a way that will allow your horses to travel as far as they want, whenever they want, thus they will exercise themselves for you and give themselves all the benefits of increased health. Here is a way that will give you the control, and responsibility for your land so that you can manage it simply and effectively in a way that will allow you to naturally control worms and to control things like nutrition, especially important if you have a horse that easily gets overweight and/or suffers from laminitis, the two are often linked. What you need to do is build a ‘Paddock Paradise’.
Paddock Paradise
Paddock Paradise is a simple idea, (first proposed by Jamie Jackson in his book, ‘Paddock Paradise’) all you need is to isolate with an electric fence a track area around your field. The track can be of varying widths but usually 15 to 20 feet is ample. The horses should not be allowed access to the central area, for most of the year. What will happen is that the horses will eat the grass from the track area and yet the central area will be left to nature and will grow you a handy supply of mixed species hay or haylage. So immediately you have created two quite distinct environments, a very short , nutritionally poor environment that is the horses natural home, and a long, undisturbed, nutritionally rich, hay meadow that can be used in any way you wish. Immediately we are creating biodiversity, and that doesn’t just benefit horses it also benefits plants and wildlife. We have also minimized the damage that intensive grazing of grass pastures by horses can cause (Poaching and so-called, horse sick grassland). Best of all we have added this environment to our existing paddock, for nothing more than the cost of some electric fencing.
The track should be continuous in that the horses can travel all the way round in a circuit and you should place forage; hay or haylage around it, this supplies the horse’s need to forage and find the food. This should become the horse’s main source of food and searching for it should be the horse’s main activity during the day. In other posts I will look at suitable complimentary feeds to accompany the forage diet.
If you walk around the track you will notice that different parts of the field now have quite distinct ‘atmospheres’, for example, if the track passes under trees or by sheltered hedgerows or along a river bank, there will be a different feeling at different times of the day as the sun moves round. It is as if you have constructed different rooms within the former ‘empty’ field. I believe horses find this mentally very stimulating, and of course because the barrier is just electric tape you can move this at a later date if you want to.
I have kept my horses like this for two years now and I can honestly say it is the best thing I ever did. I use the paddock paradise system until as late in the year as I can but inevitably the winter rain makes it a no-go area, but by this time my horses have free access to the centre of the field and I am fortunate in that I have concrete areas they can be away from the track, they always live in a herd and are never stabled. In about March the horses return to living on the track and they stay there until the following December depending on weather.
Working with the environment instead of against it
I have found that I can get a lot more out of my Paddock Paradise track system in small ways by using the flexibility of the fencing system. In this section I will look at how I use the fencing system to get:
- the horses to clear undesirable, but harmless ‘weeds’
- to encourage the growth of indigenous native grass species
- to help break the life-cycle of worms
- to enrich bio-diversity of both plant and animal species
Some time ago I came across a system of stocking cattle in the USA called ‘Mob Stocking’, basically this was a grazing technique based on a large number of animals foraging on a small area for a short time and allowing the ground to recover slowly. The original idea came from observing the natural movement of large herbivores such as buffalo across the plains. These animals have a similar nibbling and moving-on type foraging behavior to horses, and I wondered if I could use this knowledge in conjunction with a track system. The principle of mob stocking has four requirements
- Small area
- Intensive grazing of mature grass with large number of animals
- Grazed for a short period, no more than 12 to 24 hours
- Long recovery period before grazing again
The idea is that the grass recovers quickly because although most of the green part of the plant is removed, the roots of the plant which are extensive and still functioning. The farmer that demonstrated this explained how when he looked at a field of grass he not only saw the grass crop but also imagined the networks of roots, (the biomass) beneath the ground, (or ‘soil horizon’ as he called it). This biomass is important because it is where the bulk of the plant nutrient is stored. It is also an place where carbon dioxide is locked up beneath the ground, – sorry soil horizon.
I tried some experiments on my track by simply moving the boundary fence in over a relatively small area for one day. I found that the horses who were usually reluctant to eat harmless but unwelcome weed species such as thistles would not only eat the long grass but would also clear the land of thistles, furthermore plant species they definitely won’t eat such as docks were left high and dry and it was easy just to dig them up. In addition other invasive species such as buttercups (note: poisonous to horses), were crushed and easily removed. The dung that the horses left could be raked out and spread to dry in the sunshine as it was now back behind the fence. I found that this allowed wild birds to come in and search for tasty insects. I believe that exposure to sunshine desiccated and killed any hatching worm egg larvae that might be present, thus breaking the worm life cycle, all without the use of chemicals.
This system originally appealed to farmers as it allowed them to get a lot of nutrient energy from what was conventionally thought of as ‘poor’ agricultural grassland and a lot of regrowth without the use of artificial fertilizers, using instead the organic material left behind by the cattle. The only problem was that this system was intended to grow ‘a lot of cow’ from the land and that is definitely something we don’t want to do to our horses! I know some people who use a paddock paradise track never allow their horses to graze growing grass, especially if the horse is overweight or prone to laminitis, but the areas I am talking about are literally only a few square feet of grassland, and I have total control of how much they get and for how long. I am a little suspicious of saying the horses should never get grass, as it is the most natural part of their diet and there would be nothing stopping a wild horse from eating as much as they wanted if they came across young growing grass as part of their natural environment*. It seems to me that would just be replacing one unnatural feeding regime with another equally unbalanced one.
*Although under normal circumstance my horses, at any rate, will always eat mature grass in preference to leafy green grass.
One last point, after the mob stocking exercise I have now created a third environment, a short or even bare area on the track, a fully mature area in the middle and partially recovering area between them. All this means greater bio-diversity, more plant and animal species, more insect life etc. And of course, happy healthy horses.
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Tags: conservation, Health, manure, Nutrition, nutritionally poor environments, nutritionally rich environments, Paddock Paradise, track systemPosted in Paddock Paradise | No Comments »
