[RC] Horse won't drink water when offered - Wendy Mancini
April, sounds like a plan.
Try different
types of buckets, reg horse buckets & the white ones. When my
waterer was out of order, I put out 8 buckets/4 horses for the daylight hours
& there was some water left over.
For night time try
a muck bucket tub. I use one of these in my horses pen at
rides.
When I got
Serts (my free lease) his owner told me I might have trouble with him taking
him camping or to endurance rides because he would only drink out of *his*
creek or a trough. Not buckets and not strange creeks. I haven't been worried
about him so far, but had an idea in the last couple of days and wondered if
anyboy tried this and/or what other people thought about it.
Idea is
this: be the sole source of water for the horses at home. We have a water
trough. In the back hill, where they're shut up for 2 months because we just
seeded the front pasture, there is no source of natural water. The water
trough is back there. I was thinking to drain the water trough and bring
water out to them several times a day in buckets. A lot of work, yes, but my
reasoning is that they will begin to look to me to provide their water and
hopefully will drink away from home when I offer them water. Is this flawed
reasoning?
If I did decide to do away with the water trough, how much
water should they be drinking each day and how often should I offer? I'm
currently unemployed so would have the time now to devote to teaching them
(especially Serts) to drink when offered. I was thinking to leave water for
them overnight since I'm not planning on getting up several times during the
night to water them. How big of a container would be needed for overnight
watering for one horse?
