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

1. Small area
2. Intensive grazing of mature grass with large number of animals
3. Grazed for a short period, no more than 12 to 24 hours
4. 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.

I’ve recently been reading a book on, ‘pasture management for horses’, you might think that’s probably because I have too much time on my hands and not many friends. Neither of which is true, I hasten to add. Anyway, the book has raised some interesting questions. The approach taken by the (otherwise excellent) author is rather conventional. I would describe it, not so much as sound advice to the horse owner more as one way of looking at pasture management. I tend to think of this approach as ‘Penelope’s perfect pasture plan’. – (probably for Penelope to keep her perfect pony in), but enough of this alliteration.

It is based on optimizing grazing, by treating the grass as a crop. Also a great deal of it appears to be geared toward creating a ‘tidy’ appearance to your paddock.

I’ve seen this type of thing before, way back in the 1970′s when I was a young agricultural student. The advice given is really designed to maximise production from a single grass species, because that will in turn maximise the production of meat and milk and wool from a given area of pasture. Being at Agricultural college at this time was both exciting and terrible; exciting because we were told we would be entering a brave new world of agricultural production, and terrible because in many ways we were being taught how to tear down an agricultural system that had been in place for over a thousand years. Everything in those days was about the movement away from mixed species farming on small family farms towards bigger and more mechanised and more profitable farming methods, or as we call it today ‘agribusiness’. Worst of all was the utterly profligate use of chemicals to impose man’s will on the environment. I remember being issued with a big blue book published by, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, it was a long and comprehensive list of sprays and fertilisers we could use at will to control our environment. Almost all of the chemicals listed in that book are now illegal. I would also go on to say that almost all the techniques we were taught have now been discredited and we are still paying the price for the appalling mistakes we made. For example demolition of hedgerows, draining of wetlands, dissolution of mixed farms. Yet, we still see the legacy of those times in our countryside today, as farms get bigger, machinery gets bigger less and less people actually work on the land and not only people, but even livestock become further removed from the environment. This was a BIG mistake.

Before I finish this rant, you might like to know that on a Wednesday afternoon we were allowed to do ‘options’, for example you could work towards your sprayer certificate qualification, or improve your pig keeping skills (no, really!) but I, and two others chose this new option called ‘conservation’ – much to the amusement of my fellow students. If you go to my old college today it is no longer an pure agricultural college, now more or less the whole college is devoted to that one subject of conservation, I think they call it something like environmental management, – but they mean conservation.

To return to the subject of pasture management for horses, the point of all this is to show you that most equestrian pasture management, in the UK at least, is still using that old thinking from the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties. People are still trying to control the environment using weed killers, still dishing out nitrogen based artificial fertilisers (a by-product of the oil industry), still killing unwanted insect species using insecticide, still trying to maximise what they consider to be ‘good grasses’, and still trying to create a uniform productive, efficient and above all, tidy field in which to keep their horses.

But nature doesn’t work like this.

Nature produces riotous, untidy, vigorous, environments, that work and interact and have a life-cycle. Plants work with insects, insects feed predators, fungus and bacteria breakdown and recycle nutrient and energy back into the soil. Animals, feed and graze, they break up and aerate the soil with their feet allowing air, water and sunlight in. The cycle of birth life and death functions continually throughout the years and throughout the seasons.

There are no weeds in nature.

A farmer will tell you, that horses ‘impoverish’ the fields, they will tell you that the activities of horses always lead to over-grazing and ‘horse-sick’ pastures and weeds. If you leave your paddock they will bring in their machinery and sprays etc. and attempt to return the pasture to agricultural mono-crop sterility as quickly as they can.

As I said, that is one way of looking at it, another way to look at it is that horses do exactly the opposite! They enrich pasture, that is they create areas that are more or less grazed, (micro-environments), these increase the opportunity for plant and animal species to colonise the field so that there is an actual increase in the number of grass species, Mature grasses bring increases in the biomass (roots) beneath the ground. This biomass is store of nutrient and other chemicals such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The natural activities of horses create space for wild plants and indigenous, hardy, native grass species to grow, horses also produce large amounts of processed plant material in the form of recyclable, organic droppings. So they increase the number of insect species, fungus and bacteria and this, in turn, attracts in more birds and mammals, and even reptiles and amphibians. In other words, if managed properly, horses can give us a greatly increased biodiversity of our countryside, a huge helping-hand for nature and a chance to put right some of those post war agricultural mistakes and all as a by-product of keeping horses . And if you extrapolate this across the countryside as a whole think of the accumulative effect this could have on our countryside, not to mention the health of our horses.

That I would say is another way of looking at pasture management. In the next post I will look at practical ways of using your paddock paradise arrangement to control weeds (in a good way -absolutely no chemicals)! A simple technique to break the life-cycle of intestinal worms and generally help the hedgehog and butterfly populations live happy and fulfilled lives. Until then…

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:

1. On or near ‘stud piles’ around it’s home range
2. 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

Although the basic idea is deceptively simple, consisting of little more than creating a perimeter track using electric tape, I believe Paddock Paradise to be possibly one of the most revolutionary ideas in the management of horses for many hundreds (possibly thousands?) of years.

In order to justify that statement, let’s take a look at some of the many advantages:

First of all, horses are creatures of movement, in the wild this movement is almost constant, with horses traveling as far as twenty to thirty miles every day of their lives. This is not just aimless wandering but rather traveling from resource to resource, as and when the herd requires it. This is something undertaken by even the youngest foals, foals that are able to travel with the herd within a few hours of birth.

Horses are designed like this by nature.

It is this lifestyle of constant movement that keeps wild horses in the peak of physical fitness and it is movement and the ability to forage over a wide area that allows the horse to live in ‘nutritionally poor environments’ where they specialise in extracting energy from very low quality, fiber-based food sources and it is the ability to move and travel and the consequent athletic ability that we humans find to be the most useful ability of the species.

The natural daily feeding pattern of the horse is not, as most humans believe, based around regular mealtimes but on ‘trickle feeding’ and a constant regular browsing and moving-on behavior, that is the primary daily activity of the horse.

A Paddock Paradise or track-based system gives back to horses this natural ability to move. Fiber-rich food sources, such as hay, are placed at intervals around the track and the horses move from resource to resource, just as they would in the wild.

Constant movement gives back to the horse it’s healthy physique, helps develop muscles, tendons, bones, healthy circulation and respiration. Ridden horses no longer need to be ‘warmed up’ as they are constantly moving all day, every day.

Horses can interact naturally with other herd members with activities such as grazing, dozing, sleeping, social and sexual behavior.

If circumstances allow, horses can access trees for shade and shelter and herbs and other mixed species of plant that allow them to control their own body temperature, self-groom and also self-medicate.

Paddock Paradise was conceived for barefoot horses and is especially useful for horses prone to laminitis or weight problems. It is simple to restrict the amount and availability of grass at all times, some users even eliminate grass altogether, especially in springtime. By moving the fencing around the perimeter, it is possible to give a controlled amount of access to mature grass during the autumn. The period over which the grass is grazed can also be controlled so that poaching of the ground is eliminated and possible infestation by parasites minimized (without use of chemicals!).

Since the primary input into this system is hay it is nice to have a system that actually creates hay and thus saves you money! The center of the paddock can also be used for equestrian activities – and fun!

The track system has a great many advantages for conservation, creating species rich traditional grassland, that is left alone for long periods. Imagine the effect if this system was adopted universally over traditional stable/paddock systems, thousands of acres of grassland could be returned to traditional long term pasture leys as a by-product of keeping horses.

These are just a few advantages of the paddock paradise system. Stay tuned for more.