Bank your horse’s stall walls with extra bedding.

 

There are about as many ways to bed and clean a stall as there are horses. You may want to bank your horse’s stall by piling the shavings or bedding up the walls to create slopes. The middle of the stall remains flat or flat-ish.

 

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Why banking the stall walls with shavings is helpful

 

Save the stall walls from urine and manure.

 

• Stallions and geldings urinate underneath themselves (we hope), while mares can sometimes just hit the wall. You also have the type of horse that likes to back up to the wall to poop. For these horses, using banked shavings helps alleviate some of the urine and manure that gets smeared on the walls. This might make keeping ammonia away easier, too.

 

Photo courtesy of CSF Groom School

 

Banked stall walls to help prevent casting

 

• The theory is that horse’s won’t flip over and get stuck if they are more in the middle of the stall. Or if they do a flip, the banked walls won’t let their legs go all the way down and get wedged, they might still be able to flip back and right themselves. This is no guarantee that a horse won’t cast himself, but it might help.

 

This stall has a smaller bank, but still enough to store some shavings for you to pull down when needed.

 

Banked walls also make stall cleaning a bit easier.

 

• After picking manure and removing the urine spots, you can pull some shavings from the bank to refill the shavings that you removed. Also known as the deep litter bedding system, this works for some horses.

 

• You also have less to drag from the shavings pile daily if you stash shavings on the walls. This is great for barns with limited storage! Or if you totally despise hauling fresh shavings to the stalls every day.

 

Sure, poop right up against the wall.

 

 

• You may need to modify the pen to have the same benefits for the horse that has a run or in-n-out attached to his house. If you have fencing or pipe corral to create the run, having something on the bottom as a wall helps prevent his legs from getting tangled. A wall on the bottom also allows you to bank up the shavings just as you would a stall.

 

 

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