Clean Drinking Water

Water is the single thing, aside from air, that mammals cannot be deprived of and live. Hydrate or die is about as serious an adage one can see or hear, but it’s absolutely true. As with humans, horses require water in order to remain healthy and if they don’t have it extreme health risks can occur. Whether your horse is your wife’s best friend or you own a stable of $20,000 or more racing horses you are going to want to guarantee they have the best water source .

The common thought is if you wouldn’t drink the water available to your horse the chances are your horse isn’t going to be motivated to drink it either. Horses can be one of the more finicky animals that may come under your care and they typically require about 1 gallon of fresh water per day for each 100 lbs. of body weight. This is for a horse at rest – grazing, wandering around, not working, and generally not exerting very much energy. Any additional activity and the horse is going to consume even more water, sometimes an upwards of 2 gallons per 100 lbs. If your horse tips the scales about 1000 lbs. and runs around all day it’s going to need at least 10 gallons of fresh water.

If your horse’s trough resembles a neglected fish tank, is murky, full of bugs, and if there’s any odor coming off of it a at all, your horse isn’t going to want to drink the water provided and if they become thirsty enough to do so, it’s not going to be healthy for them to drink. There will be bacteria and viruses within the unsavory water that aren’t going to be horse-friendly. It really is a good idea to use an automatic waterer to ensure that your horses have enough fresh drinking water.

You can get tubs that have automatic waterers built in that will run fresh water through as necessary to ensure that the water is as fresh as can be up to a point, but the majority of these waterers aren’t self-cleaning so you still have to do the unsavory task of scrubbing troughs. You can ensure that your horse has clean water in their watering buckets, but the issue with watering buckets is that unless you’re on top of them 3 or 4 times per day they are going to get murky and disgusting even before night falls.