Throughout the year, it is common for your horse to experience high levels of stress. This stress can be caused by a number of factors including lack of turn out, vigorous training routines, and bad weather. Stress can cause various health issues as well as lead to an unhappy horse.
One way to alleviate stress is to minimize boredom in the horse stall and barn. In this article, we would like to share a number of improvements to consider in the barn to optimize your horse's happiness.
Maximize Turnout
While we manufacturer high-quality horse stalls, we wholeheartedly believe that horses should spend as much time outside as possible. That is why we recommend to turn your horse out as often as possible. This turnout time gives your horse time to relax, freely move around, play, graze, and socialize with other horses. A consistent turnout routine will go a long way in reducing your horse's stress and improving his happiness. more time that your horse can spend in his pasture, the happier that your horse will be.
Expert Tip: For this reason, we always recommend our clients to consider Dutch Doors or Sliding Paddock Doors over Barn Windows. Exterior Stall Doors ensure that your horse can be easily turned out into a pasture or pen.
Add a Yoke Opening to Your Stall Doors
We often see stress and anxiety arise in horses when they spend excessive amounts of time in their horse stalls. We do understand that some facilities or situations require the horses to spend significant amounts of time in their horse stalls.
In any case, we always recommend clients to consider adding a yoke opening to their horse stall doors. This opening will safely house your horse in their stall, but provide them with an opening to stick their head out into the aisle. This is a small detail, but a yoke allows your horse to socialize and see what is going on in the rest of this barn. This small design change can go a long way in improving your horse's stress.
Expert Tip: If you are purchasing new horse stalls, a yoke opening is a simple add to your horse stall doors. If you have existing horse stalls, our stall gates are a great way to add a yoke opening to existing, older horse stalls.
Open Stall Front Design
This suggestion is for those who are building a new barn or renovating an existing barn. If you have the luxury, we always recommend clients to choose horse stall designs that have open look and feel.
For European Stall Fronts, a client already has the advantage that the stall front's top is open already – especially compared to a traditional sliding horse stall. That being said, you can further open your stall up by adding mesh or grilled bars in the bottom. The mesh or bars can be added to either the entire horse stall front or just to the stall door.
For Sliding Horse Stall Fronts, we recommend clients to add a yoke opening (as mentioned above). This opening will let your horses put their heads into the aisle. This additional provides your horses with a more natural, less confined feel. Similar to European Stall Fronts, you can add mesh or grilled bottoms to your Sliding Stall Fronts.
Partitions (Dividers) with Grill Sections
Lastly, we recommend clients to put grill sections (1" round bars) across the top of their horse stall partitions. Similar to the open stall front design, "open" horse stall dividers will allow your horses to have better visibility into the adjacent horse stall. This visibility will do wonders for your horse's comfort in their horse stall.
One way to add another layer of thoughtfulness is to consider adding a privacy section. We very often build Partial Privacy Partitions for clients' barns. In these partitions, the grilled section is about two-thirds of the partition length. The remaining one-third is a wood-filled section. For these partitions, we recommend to position these in the area where your horse will eat. This positioning allows your horse to eat without being disturbed by a horse in a neighboring horse stall. This small change can help your horse maintain a sense of privacy and calm.
These are just a few ways that you can minimize your horse’s stress and boredom in the barn. Do you have any additional questions on how you potentially optimize your barn? Our team of experts is here to help guide you every step of the way. Please kindly feel free to send us an email at sales@americanstalls.com or a call at (855) 957-8255. Alternatively, you can also complete a Contact Us Form.
