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Horse PelletsJanuary 30, 2006 Stripped to its essentials, horse-keeping is a fairly low-tech (not to be confused with "cheap") activity. Horses are hardy, horses are foragers; they don't need a whole lot to be happy. Humans, on the other hand, like to worry and complicate things, and marketers are brilliant at exacerbating worries that already exist, creating worries where worries were previously unknown, and selling us stuff to make the worries less worrisome. I suspect that most non-essential horse stuff is bought by women. Collectively we're an easy mark for the marketers' pitches: haven't we been bombarded since childhood with worries about our own shortcomings and pitches for products that promise to fix them? So we worry that our horses aren't warm enough, or aren't cool enough; that they might contract West Nile Virus from a passing crow, or that they would be more responsive with a different bit, less hyper with a Jolly Ball in their paddock, healthier with a different feed, or less prone to lameness and intestinal disturbance with a daunting array of supplements. Horses can be ingenious at evading odd powders in their grain (the marketers are almost as ingenious at coming up with flavors tempting to the equine palate), but they are less likely than children to stash that nice warm coat behind a rock and go off to school in their shirtsleeves. Most horses are pretty tolerant of all the trips we humans lay on them, and I confess I'm not immune to the temptation to buy stuff for my horse. Allie gets an all-purpose supplement that claims it's "essential for your horse to thrive." I'm not sucker enough to believe that Allie would stop thriving without it, but deep down I'm afraid that the other horses will razz her because their owners care enough to add yucky green and white powders to their feed but Allie's owner is too cheap. At my current horse-sit, I've had the opportunity to "join up" with the newest newfangled thing in horse bedding: wood pellets. I'm balking. Around here horse stalls are generally bedded with wood shavings or, more rarely, straw. The idea is that you spread these gray-white pellets in your horse's stall -- the instructions on the bag suggest starting with about 240 pounds for an average-size stall, and your horse's hoof action, combined with, uh, moisture, breaks the pellets down into -- how to describe it? -- a coarse, absorbent substance that looks a lot like dirt. You remove the manure but mix the wet stuff (technical name for "number one") into the dry stuff, which will absorb the wet stuff and enable you to reuse it, not indefinitely but for considerably longer than you can reuse wet wood shavings (which is not at all). It's like cat litter. However, even if you know nothing about horses, you can glimpse a possible problem. Cats generally weigh 10 to 15 pounds. Horses weigh more like 1,000. Cats climb into the litterbox to do their business, then they leave. Horses spend hours in their stalls, and many of them sleep lying down. The broken-down pellets are highly compressible. The weight of a horse, standing or snoozing, compresses them highly. Highly compressed broken-down pellets are heavy. Wet highly compressed broken-down pellets are even heavier. Aerating this stuff is like trying to stir half-set concrete. The instructions on the bag direct the user to remove bedding when it can't absorb any more moisture. My client described this state as looking "like the beach at low tide." Trouble is, most of it looks like the beach at low tide, and some of it looks more like exposed mud flats that have recently hosted a flock of Canada geese. Nasty stuff. Do you really want to mix fresh pellets into the mud, in hope that they will absorb the excess moisture? No matter how mightily one may hope that the good (dry) pellets will exert a positive influence on the nasty (wet) bedding, the nasty stuff turns the dry stuff to crud. "Throwing good money after bad" comes to mind, and the warning that one bad apple can turn the whole barrel. (Didn't Spiro Agnew say something like that?) Over the last few days I've achieved a truce with this pellet stuff. If it's not more than two or three inches deep, you can turn and mix it without straining your back. Still, it's not exactly attractive. A fancy show or racing stable open to the public would probably not choose to use this stuff. Visitors would look in and say, "Eieuww, dirty dirt!" Actually, most horses would be perfectly happy with dirt. At her last barn, Allie shared a big run-in shed with two or three other horses. In winter the shed was generously bedded with straw. Where did the horses sleep? In the deep pine needles under the pine trees. Some other horses I look after occasionally favor autumn leaves that have been puréed by a leaf-chewer. Sooner or later the marketers will figure out a way to sell us pine needles and chewed-up leaves as the latest thing in horse-keeping.
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