Fuzzy Wuzzy Winter Spa Day
Treat your horse to some extra winter grooming with help from a professional equine groom.
treat your horse to some extra winter grooming with help from a professional equine groom.
With fading daylight, frozen tundra and maybe a polar vortex thrown in, winter is hard on horse keepers. The days are short, but the season is long. Shows, spring trail rides or simply seeing your horse before dark on a Tuesday evening after work seem a long way off.
One way to make the most of the winter slowdown at the barn is to take the time for some extra grooming sessions with your horse. With a little primping, you can embrace that winter fluff as cute, perhaps even cuddly. But first, you’ll need to chisel off the mud, remove those embarrassing sweat marks and do some freshening up.
As they say, when you look good, you feel good. Even if you and your horse aren’t going anywhere fancy for a while, grooming offers overall wellness benefits for both of you.
“Any time you can work your arm muscles and give your horse a thorough grooming, you will strengthen his shine and the bond between the two of you,” says Liv Gude, founder of the website www.proequinegrooms.com and host of the Proequinegrooms podcast. Gude, a professional who has groomed for Olympic riders, founded the website to share her knowledge about grooming, barn management and overall equine health with horse owners.
“The main purpose of grooming is to monitor your horse’s health,” she says. “Are his legs tight? Is his skin healthy? Are his eyes bright? Are vital signs normal? Does he have any cuts, scrapes, swellings or heat spots? If you groom thoroughly and make his health the top priority, the bloom and shine will follow.”
Here are some of her favorite tips and tricks to make your winter grooming sessions easier and more effective, along with a few techniques to level up your grooming game.
WINTERIZE YOUR GROOMING KIT
With a fuzzy winter coat, Gude’s advice is to “go deep.”
“A winter coat is great at trapping things like dirt, lice, dust, dander (which is shedding
skin), and sweat,” she explains. “This makes for the perfect petri dish for skin rubs, sores and infections to happen.”
That may mean switching to brushes with tougher bristles, adding some different grooming tools, or changing your brush lineup to a mix of soft and hard brushes according to your horse’s winter coat thickness and individual tolerance levels. Gude is a big fan of grooming gloves.
“I can never go wrong with them,” she says. Cactus cloth is another favorite recommendation for buffing your horse in the colder months. “The texture is great for getting out sweat spots and adding some sheen,” Gude adds.
BRUSH REFRESH
Brushes can get especially grubby over the winter when you aren’t bathing your horse as often, and because winter coats tend to hold more dust and debris. If you notice that your brushes have seen brighter days, Gude suggests giving your grooming kit a spa day of its own more frequently than in warmer weather.
It can be challenging to wash and dry your brushes in the middle of winter, but it’s well worth the effort. A sparkling set of brushes will leave your horse sparkling too. Follow Gude’s method:
1. Soak and scrub in warm water with a few drops of mild horse shampoo to clean, or chlorhexidine solution (Novalsan) to disinfect.
2. Rinse thoroughly.
3. Dry brushes with bristles facing down or on their side, so that the bristles don’t drain into wood brush backs. Gude uses a folding laundry rack, but brushes can also dry on the ground, or on a towel in the tack room.
BUST DUST AND ZAP STATIC
Dust can be annoyingly persistent to remove from a thick winter coat. Here, Gude wields a dampened washcloth as her secret weapon. Simply hold the damp washcloth in one hand, then swipe your brush across the damp cloth every few strokes to get those last bits of dust off the surface of the coat.
This technique helps cut down on static, another winter grooming nemesis. You can
also use any sort of grooming spray or conditioner to spritz on your horse and cut the static, says Gude. For a static-filled tail, hold your damp cloth in your palm and run it down the tail.
HOT TOWEL TREATMENT
If you want to go “extra” in the winter, Gude recommends a hot toweling treatment.
“This lets you do a bath in cold weather. It’s time consuming, but you can spot-clean as needed without doing a full-body hot toweling session,” she says.
Here’s how:
1. Before your hot toweling session, curry and brush your horse to remove as much dirt as you can.
2. Prepare a bucket of piping-hot water. If your barn doesn’t have hot water, Gude likes to use an electric kettle for hot water on demand. (There are also plug-in bucket heaters that brew up super hot bathing water available from tack shops.) Add some spot remover, if needed. You’ll also need a second bucket of rinse water to refresh dirty towels.
3. You’ll want to wear gloves to protect your hands from the hot water. Dunk a washcloth into the hot water. Wring it out until it’s almost dry and use that to curry your horse. As you are wringing out the cloth, the temperature will cool enough to safely use on your horse.
“The goal is toasty warm and barely damp steamy cloths,” says Gude.
4. Work in small sections. If it’s cold or breezy out, cover your horse’s damp areas with a wool or fleece cooler to help him dry. You can even clean the mane using the same process. Fold the cloth, lift a small section of hair and swipe it down; continue along the rest of the mane. Tails are also cleaned in this fashion. Another option is to spray the mane or tail with a spot remover or no-rinse shampoo, then use a damp cloth to wipe them.
5. Your horse should be barely damp after you rub. If he’s wet, it means you need to wring out the towel more, says Gude. Dunk dirty towels into a bucket of rinse water before re-using.
WINTER GROOMING SOLUTIONS
As winter slogs along, grooming issues can pile up into a big hairy, muddy, sweaty mess. Fortunately, Gude has solutions for all of these.
MUD: Prevention through pasture management is Gude’s best advice. It’s safe to say she’s not a fan of mud. In addition to grooming problems, mud causes skin infections, and deep mud can create sore muscles and tendon