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Hello, my name is Neil Draper and we're going to talk about shelters for your pregnant mare.
Now this shelter is eighteen by twenty-one and it's got good open end for ventilation.
You want to make sure you got lots of ventilation for your horses. Their respiratory system
cannot take stale, dusty environments or having ammonia from the urine in the stalls so you'll
want to keep the stall extremely clean. Change the bedding. Now the bedding can be out of
several different materials. Good clean grass, good clean straw, there's companies that make
shavings for horses out of wood chips from pine to cedar chips. There's pellets that
absorb the horse's urine and waste and keep the environment drier. The straw and the other
shavings will do the same thing. And you'll want to spread it out evenly over the ground
and make it about three, four inches thick so it's a nice comfortable bed. And be able
to come in and keep it clean, take out the wet areas with the manure fork and haul it
off to your manure pile. And of course you'll want to take the manure out of the stall and
to keep the stall as dry and clean as possible, and usually you'll have to change your shavings
depending on your horse and your size of your stall. You know from maybe a day or two to
you know three or four days depending - a large stall of course you'd be able to keep
it cleaner and not have to change the shavings as much as a small stall. And as I said, this
stall is eighteen by twenty-one and this gives a horse plenty of room to lay down and roll
around without getting caught in the walls. Now you can see these walls are solid, so
the horse can't get its feet through the walls. You'll want - if you can a more solid area
so your horse doesn't get pinned down to the ground by putting its legs through the bars
of the fence and having the colt and we've had this happen, be born on one side of the
fence and the mare is on the other side of the fence. So if you can, it's good to have
an area where you can contain the colt and mare in. But it's not a necessity. Now if
you have an open field and the horse is free roaming and it's pasture and it's clean, then
the horse can have it out in the pasture just fine. As a matter of fact, they'd probably
prefer it that way. But where our pasture - this area is more dirt and we don't have
the pasture, we're going to try to contain the mare in here with the bedding down on
the ground to keep this area clean and nice and safe for the colt.