Natural Horse Care Tips to Keep Your Horse Cool, Hydrated, and Balanced to Reduce the Risk of Heat Stroke
Heatstroke in horses is something no owner wants to experience! We are sharing horse remedies for reducing the risk of heatstroke by keeping your horse cool, hydrated, and balanced through the summer heat.
Tips to Keep Your Horse Cool
- Sponge or spray the horse down with cool or cold water. If the horse will be in direct sunlight, focus on wetting areas that will not be: legs, chest, and neck.
- Use frozen gel pads (we found some gel dog beds at a discount retailer that worked great!) to lay across the horse’s back to help cool them off and bring the body temperature down. I got this tip from a friend and it worked great to help the horse who experienced heat stroke this week at our facility! Now that we are aware the heat is a concern for her, we take the gel pad out in the heat of the day and lay it on her back for 10-15 minutes. Great barn hack idea!!
- Keeping your horse walking can increase circulation and aid in the horse’s body cooling itself naturally.
- If there is no breeze or air moving a fan can also be helpful.
Horse Remedies for Hydration & Balance
- Use frozen water jugs or bottles to keep water troughs at a cooler temperature. You don’t really want the water cold, but cooling it off can encourage the horse to drink. Our water tanks can get too warm and this really helps.
- Utilizing a Horse Hydrator to filter the water can encourage hydration as well.
- Give the horse an organic clean source of electrolytes to ensure that the horse is maintaining and balancing electrolytes properly. If you are looking for options on this you can check out ForeRunner and ForeLyte.
These tips and remedies are what we used to help the horse out here that experienced heat stroke. They can also be used to reduce the risk of a horse experiencing heatstroke. The frozen gel pad really did the trick, the best for this particular situation. Working with all of the tips above we hope to promote the well being of that horse so it does not happen again. The other horses seem to enjoy the remedies too on these hot summer days.
The Weekly Feed Post this week will cover more on the importance of balancing the electrolytes and great options on products to help you do just that! You can also check out the links below for more related information on this topic:
You can get started on supporting your horse to vibrant health right now, by grabbing your copy of my book Healthy as a Horse! Discover the forgotten framework of care that can transform your horse’s health. Click here to reserve your copy now.
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Life is better when you’re horsin’ around!
