A sponge bath is a great way to make a horse feel good after getting cleaned up. Take care of any soreness so that a horse maintains a good attitude with helpful advice from a reining horse trainer in this video on sponge baths for horses.
We've got the horse washed off, all the dirt is 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, 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 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 on a daily basis this horse feels as good as he possibly can, alright? So we are going to do that little sponge bath and there's whether it's warm water, cold water, warm water is water. I'd 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 of the way the horse's foot is shaped in under there, water can pool in that little crease, it 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 and 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, take 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.
