Re: Blanketing Question

["Linda B. Merims" <lbm@naisp.net>]

Replying to the group because I can't find an individual
email return address...

> Ed Roley
> My daughter is now keeping her horse at someones barn
> who always blankets her horses when it is a little
> cold. She did recently when it got down to the 30's.
> She is asking us to blanket my daughters horse now...

The only reason I can think of to blanket is if your daughter's
horse has been body clipped.  Barns (not so much endurance
barns) often do this because it makes a horse much easier to
take care of in the winter:  easier to keep clean, and most
particularly, easier to dry the sweat and/or bath-to-wash-off-sweat
after exercise.  Some training barns will insist that you let
them clip to conserve the time of the staff.  As such, the horse
has been stripped of its natural blanket and will likely need blanketing
on colder nights.  They'll tell you when they need blanketing:
they shiver!

Otherwise, I can't think of a single reason to blanket.

Different horse subcultures have different conventions.  In
endurance, it's "outside and natural."  In a hunter/jumper or
a dressage barn, they even blanket in the summer!  (Notice
the pages and pages of turnout blankets in catalogs like
Dover's?)  People just do it because it's the cultural norm
in their discipline.  Your daughter is just experiencing a
culture clash.

What I heard from Harold Hintz is not that horses are
"most comfortable" at 18 degrees, but that they don't begin
to need to consume more calories just to maintain body
weight in face of the cold until about 18-20 degrees.

Linda B. Merims
lbm@naisp.net
Massachusetts, USA