If you are thinking about getting a horse for yourself or a family member, you need to become familiar with its overall care. Just like any other companion animal, horses require a substantial amount of love and care. So, let’s get started by discussing a typical day of horse ownership and good care.
1 Groom your horse
For those of you who are beginners, you need to make sure that you become familiar with the grooming of your horse. Grooming of any horse requires quite a bit of attention to detail. In many cases, you may want to start by investing in a good grooming kit. By buying a grooming kit, you will have everything that you need to do a good step by step job. From using a curry comb to loosen hair, remove dirt and other particles to using a hoof pick to remove mud and dirt from the sole of your horse’s hoof, there are a host of essential items that’s needed to do a thorough daily grooming job.
2. Feed it every day
Taking care of a horse is not all about brushing the hair on the horse’s back to get rid of dirt and debris, you need to make sure your horse is well fed, too. Yet, before you start feeding your horse bunches of grass and hay, you need to know more about their daily diets. This is because there are other foods that can help to enhance their diets and improve their overall health. For instance, you can add fruits and vegetables to their meals to keep them healthy and fit for their activities. Here are some examples of foods that help to make a good healthy horse diet regimen.
- Grass – great for their digestive system
- Hay or haylage – keeps your horse full
- Fruit or vegetables – add moisture to their feed.
- Concentrates – grains like oats, barley and corn are highly recommended for horses as they get older, nursing or pregnant.
- Salt – horses enjoy consuming salt in the summer months
- Fresh Water – twice a day, aids in keeping the digestive system moving properly
3. Make a bond
You will also spend time bonding with your horse. Bonding is necessary for a number of reasons, especially since it helps to build mutual trust between the horse and owner/care giver. Therefore, it is important that you set aside sometime to do a variety of different activities together. For instance, you can do ground work training. Ground work training can be done with the assistance of a lead rope and a halter. These training exercises are essential for helping the horse to look to you as their leader and will help them to respect your personal space. Also, when you and your horse master ground work training, it will make your horse rides a lot easier and smoother.
4. Train your horse
You should also know that there are several different types of training that you should do with your horse. Some of which are referred to as more rigorous training exercises. Here are 10 basic things that you can teach your horse to do in little to no time:
- How to touch different items with their noises (i.e. balls, toys, traffic cones)
- How to follow a target
- Move sideways
- Back up
- Leg Forward
- Leg up
- Look away
- Wait to Stand
- Come
- Head Down
These are some basic training items to start first. However, as time progresses, a horse can learn a wide host of different things, including how to perform tricks that people enjoy watching up close and from afar.
5. Act fast if the horse get sick
You should also know that part of caring for a horse involves responding to emergency medical and health care situations. So, it is very important that you act fast whenever your horse is sick. This type of care normally consists of getting emergency care from a horse doctor that can diagnose and treat the symptoms quickly. Therefore, you should also be prepared to pay for vet bills.
On the other hand, if you do not have the funds available, you can always consider getting a loan without a credit check to cover the cost of their vet bill. You can find more information about the details of these types of emergency loans online, including how quickly you can get the money in your bank account.
