Keeping a Horse

Keeping a horse happy can be hard. Horses are domestic animals, but they are adapted to living outdoors. While they require humans to live a longer life, like how humans guarantee them food, or shelter, being overly subject into how a human lives can make them uncomfortable. Natural horse keeping is something Cherry Hill explains in her book How to Think Like a Horse. In one sections Hill writes, "Keeping horses in inherently unnatural, but we can all design our facilities and management routines ro give horses as natural a life as our situation allows. The best way to prevent vices is to house and care for your horse using the principals of natural horse keeping. These include:

• As much turnout as practical in an area where cantering is possible
• Living with companions or near companions
• A large pen with sheltered loading and eating areas
• Free-choice grass hay, or a minimum of three feedings per day of grass hay
• Minimal grain
• Free-choice salt, minerals, and freshly drawn or naturally aerated water" (79).

Gravel turnout- not big enough to run around

All of these are things that can make it much better for a horses life. These are generally things that they find in the wild, where they can run and be with their companions and eat wherever they want. While not all these things are possible, as many of them as you can manage for your horse will make their life a lot happier. If you can't obtain all these, vices can occur in horses. Horses that cannot adapt to the way humans have them live will develop vices, or stereotypies (Hill 80). This means that horses can be negatively affected from incorrect care. Conflict can happen, meaning the horse has two opposing urges to get one thing, but another factor of it scares the horse (Hill 80).

Closed stall

If a horse has two conflicting desires they can possibly get harmed. If they get too panicked and get hurt, they can associate it as bad and will never learn. It's better to leave a horse with as many of their natural instincts as they can. I will be able to learn from this book by leaving Leo more hay. Right now he only gets 2 feedings a day, and he has no hay that he can just go eat. In the summer he will be able to have turn out too, which is recommended by Hill. 

Do you think that horses are too demanding in their care? What would you do if a horse didn't have all of the recommended principles? Which principle do you think is unnecessary? 

Hill, Cherry. "Natural Horsekeeping." How to Think like a Horse: The Essential Handbook for Understanding Why Horses Do What They Do. North Adams, MA: Storey Pub., 2006. 79-80. Print.