Cleaning a Horse

After riding a horse, the horse needs to be cleaned so that the horse is comfortable and ready to sleep. Tie a horse up and use a hose to clean it off with helpful advice from a reining horse trainer in this video on cleaning horses.

When we're done riding him, we want to make sure we get this horse cleaned off. We could have gotten dirt in places that don't need to have dirt, so we got to make sure he's cleaned up and so that he's very comfortable and ready for a good night's sleep. Let's go ahead to the wash rack. Now we're going to take him in, turn him around and put him in cross ties just like we did before. Now if you don't have a wash rack that's OK, you can tie him to a tree and just use a hose from the barn, that works as well or just stand there and hold him and hose him off. But the main thing is to get the sweat off of him and to get the dirt off of his legs, any mud that happened to be collected on his feet, you want to get that off because that could just dry and cake on there and actually dries his feet out. And any mud that hangs on him, from whether you went on a trail ride or your arena might have rained. So, you got to wash that off otherwise it can really turn his hair bad, it can cause some other problems. Also, there's fungus, things that grow in sand and dirt that can cause problems with the horse's hair and we don't want his hair to fall off, so we got to get rid of all that gunk from him. Now you'll notice Lynn pulled the boots off and laid them over here, she's going to wash those too when we get done with Sparky. Make sure that all your equipment is cleaned up when you're done. But now she's going to go ahead and start from the ground up. Notice she starts down low, down to his feet. This gets the horse accustomed to the water, to the temperature of it, whether it's warm, whether it's cold, maybe you don't have a hot water thing. If not, obviously it's good to start at the bottom. Let your horse get used to it just like you stepping into a cold pool of water, you take your big toe first and then your little toe and then the rest of you gets in, alright? Same thing with a horse. Start at the ground and work your way up. Don't just a grab a hose and go right at the horse's back or his body especially with cold water, boy it will lock him up and it just, a horse can get pretty anxious about that sort of thing. Plus if he's had a hard ride and he's really sweaty and you go at him with cold water, now his muscles could actually tense up and lock up, you can create a cramp or muscle spasm. Alright so we're going to start low, work our way up. Notice we don't have a lot of sweat on Sparky today. If we did, we'd do his whole body but right now Lynn is just doing his legs, getting his legs really cleaned off and nice like that, alright? If his tail was dirty we'd wash his tail, all kinds of good soaps out there, again get them at the salon. We just want to take care of our horse, that's our wash rack experience. We've got the horse washed off, all the dirt's gone off of him. Now, we want to make sure that he feels good afterwards. So this is where we're going to take this sponge and it's got some water mixed with a little liniment in it. We can do his whole body or just his legs. But notice Lynn is going up and down his legs, around his shoulders, basically just making him feel really good. It's just kind of like an overall body rub down with a little liniment just to take care of any little sorenesses that might crop up. Remember, a sound horse is very, very important. If your horse is a little unsound, got those bumps and bruises, it's going to affect his attitude and that can really be a negative snowball so we want to make sure that on a daily basis this horse feels as good as he possibly can, alright? So we are going to do that little sponge bath but there's whether it's warm water, cold water, warm is better. I highly recommend warm water for the sponge bath but your horse will get used to whatever, just be careful if it is cold, don't go right at him with it. Now she's going to take a towel and wipe his legs down, wipe down any areas that are dripping in water. Of course if we would have given him an overall body bath or body wash, we would have taken a scraper, some kind of a squeegee and just squeegeed the water off of him first, alright? But notice how she's doing the legs and right in underneath the ankles, right above his hoof, right above his heels, she's paying particular attention to really drying that spot out. Notice it's almost like polishing a shoe alright? Just using that towel back and forth right in underneath those ankles and the reason is, because the way the horse's foot is shaped in under there water can poll in that little crease, in that little spot and it will actually cause a fungus and cause what we call scratches on a horse. And scratches can make one pretty sore. I mean they get pretty grouchy about those things. So drying that area is very important before we put him back in the stall. She's also going around his mouth taking care of his mouth and his head, make sure that's clean. And once we've washed him off, given him that body sponge bath and then dried off his legs, he's ready to go back to the stall.