Does your Horse Need Warm Water in Winter ?

It has been a tense couple of days in Nelipot land. Never good to finish your first operation of the day and then find a few missed calls on your phone, including the yard owner, friend and vet practice office. Poor Cal was very subdued, with his head right down, and didn’t want to move. This is unheard of in the morning when he is usually straining at the stable door, keen to get out and eat grass with his best girl Bonnie!! I knew instinctively from the video they sent me that he had a bellyache.

I am blessed to be at a yard with excellent caretakers. They immediately spotted there was a problem, and called the vet, who promptly stripped off his top, (much to my friend’s delight LOL) and did the necessary examination. He diagnosed an impaction colic.

Apparently impaction colic is the commonest veterinary emergency at this time of year when the weather changes. In humans, this would be called constipation. For the colorectal surgeons who read this, you will be delighted to know Cal got sedated, had a manual evacuation and then had a good litre or two of rehydration via a nasal tube.

Why did this happen? In Cal’s case there are probably a couple of causative factors.

First is his tendency to eat his bed. We are/ were on rape straw pellets that form a lovely absorbent base but these pellets need rehydrating before being laid as a bed. And Cal the Irish eating machine has inconveniently developed a taste for them- rape straw is annoyingly palatable. We caught him eating them in preference to hay and breakfast a couple of months ago and so have started mixing them with expensive shavings and the older bedding to try and make this option less appealing. But his bed was redone a couple of days ago and a couple of evenings ago I found him applying himself to his new bed. The pellets need soaking before they turn into sand- he will sift through the sawdust to find any pellets that are still holding their shape and munch away. Now I’m sure he has been eating bits of his bed for ages so what made the difference this time?

A horse requires 20-40L of water a day for body systems to function correctly. This requirement is the same all year round. But where the horse gets his water from may differ with the seasons.

Horse Water Consumption – Summer vs. Winter

Fresh grass consists of up to 85% water. Horses grazing for long hours on green pastures may very likely drink less than the 5 – 10 gallons a day from a direct water source. They are meeting their daily water requirements through grass consumption. Conversely, hay should contain less than 15% water. During winter months, when hay becomes the bulk of forage eaten, then direct water intake must increase.

Our stables have automatic water drinkers. Paddy used to hate his and rarely drank from it. All the horses I have kept at this yard prefer the water from the trough in the field and will always have a really good drink by the gate when first turned out. I think this is partly because it is easier to get a really good drink from the trough, and also the water probably tastes better- there is inevitably some organic matter in the bottom lending an earthy tang to the water.

The problem comes in winter when the cold weather comes in- the trough doesn’t have to be frozen over for the water to be too cold to drink easily and quickly. It turns out that many horses don’t like to consume icy or chilled water.

With Paddy we learned this expensive lesson a few years ago and mixed very sloppy winter feeds and put buckets of water in his stable, topped up with a kettle to take the cold edge off.

The secret to cold weather hydration

In summer, on the livery yard we currently call home, the horses are turned out for a longer time and eating fresh green grass which has a high water content. In winter, the horses go from night turnout to shorter daytime turn out and although the winter grass in the middle of the track is longer it is also stalkier and probably has a lower percentage water content.

Cal has always been good at drinking from his water drinker but he does prefer a good glugging from the water trough.

Another factor is that, with the recent incessant rain, I have been rugging him, selfishly, to make the evening brushing easier for me to ride. Maybe he got a bit too hot in his rug and didn’t keep up with his drinking.

Whatever the factors, he certainly didn’t drink enough water on this occasion to keep up with the load of pellets in his gut. Or maybe he did but the pellets that he carefully and diligently sifted out of his bed weren’t quite soaked enough and they swelled up further in his gut.

Either way it was a tense twenty four hours.

The horse who is actually famous for his elephant sized poohs didn’t pass any for a full day. He had some painkillers and was walked as many times as we could manage, and fed regular small doses of slop. Finally, the NEXT morning, some very uncharacteristically small neat Pferde-apfeln type pooh appeared. They were so unlike his usual pooh mountains that I had to check that no other horse had snuck into Cal’s stable!

Once I saw pooh I knew we were out of trouble. The way Cal dived into his bowl of mash soup yesterday morning was also a giveaway. The vet check up confirmed that the impaction had indeed cleared and we could go back to our usual routine. Thank goodness.

Straining at the door to go out with his girl

So what have I learned? Apart from the fact that the established tradition of a vet bill for Christmas didn’t die with the Padster. Thanks as always to Tom Walters Equine Equine for the stellar care they provide.

1. Stop using rape straw pellet bedding, It is really good product, warm, absorbent, rots down well and is a good all-round and economical option for those lucky people whose horses don’t develop a taste for them. The wood pellets are similar in function and price and I think are probably less appealing to eat.
2. We all know this one but please feed enough forage to last them most of the night. Cal chose to eat the straw pellets over hay and feed but most horses wouldn’t.
3. Feed salt in winter as well as summer- the winter reason being to encourage adequate water drinking.
4. Monitor water intake. Or be aware that a horse’s need for actual drinking water increases in winter and provide accordingly.
5. Don’t rely on automatic water drinkers- many horse don’t like the refilling noise, or find them annoying because they don’t deliver enough water to drink easily. Most horses find it easier to drink copiously from a lower water source- we tend to mount automatic drinkers in stables at shoulder height to avoid leg injuries.
6. Consider a means of providing tepid water top encourage fluid intake. A bucket of cold water with a kettle top up might just be very welcome.
7. Check the field troughs for ice and break when needed. We rarely get ice in Cheshire let alone thick unbreakable ice so we don’t generally need tennis balls or other trough tricks to prevent the water freezing.

Thank you for reading. Do you have any other tips you would like to share? Comment on the post and join the conversation.