The best way to keep flies off of horses is with any number of different fly sprays, although it's important to apply the spray with a hand so as to avoid irritating the horse's face. Learn about switching around fly sprays with help from a horse riding teacher in this free video on horse grooming.
This is Maggie Connolly with Hawthorne Stables. I want to take a moment to talk to you about fly preventive. There are many different types of fly sprays out. But you want make sure that, you know, well where there's horses, there's flies; so you want to make sure that you can keep them off your horses as much as possible because they do cause irritation especially on a horse's face. So when you're going to apply fly spray to a horse's face; usually with these mixtures, there, there is a mixture in water; you just go ahead and shake that up real good. And the best thing to do is to go ahead and spray it on your hand a little bit and then come up to the horse and what you can do is just go over the horse's eyes; spray on your hand again and go over the horse's eyes and rub their face by spraying on their face. Instead of spraying on their face, you spray it on your hands and just wipe it on their face. Then for the other parts of the body, you can just go ahead and start up and then just fly spray around. Now as far as choosing a type of fly spray that works best; what I like to do is I like to switch them around a little bit. What happens is some flies may actually become somewhat immune to certain types. So I try to switch out the types a little bit in order to try and keep the fly population down and off my horse. This is Maggie Connolly with Hawthorne Stables.
