BLANKETING AT HOME VS. BOARDING BARNS
Professional equine grooms Cat Hill and Emma Ford, authors of World-Class-Grooming, have worked in barns large and small, with blanketing recommendations for each scenario.
For people who care for their own horses and are not blanket-changing multiple times throughout the day, they recommend one of the interchangeable blanketing systems as a good cost-effective option. These typically include a waterproof outer layer with liners that clip in. The liners are usually less expensive than a blanket, and you can swap them out to keep them clean and dry.
“A clean blanket is really important to keep a horse warm, because if the polyfill absorbs oil from the horse’s coat and packs down, it no longer has air pockets and is no longer is warm,” explains Hill. “I always talk about ‘clean underpants’—we like to keep a sheet on the horse next to the skin. I keep two cheap cotton sheets that I can wash easily because then I don’t have to wash my big, heavy blankets as often.”
If barn sta are the ones blanketing and unblanketing your horse, it’s important to be considerate.
“If you keep your horse at a large boarding barn where somebody other than you is in charge of changing 20 horse blankets in a day, the blanketing systems are a pain for them because they have to take the whole thing o, change the layers, and put it back on,” says Ford.
In that situation, she recommends having a lightweight (100g or 150g fill weight), a medium, and a heavy because you can layer between those three. The barn worker can put these on or o as needed, and they can go in whatever order.
“At the end of the day, what is most convenient for the sta is going to mean your horse is blanketed appropriately if you’re not the one in charge of it,” says Ford. Ask them what they prefer and works best for them.