I just recieved a copy of The Gait Post, a local monthly horse magazine. Laurie Pitts was featured in a very nice article in which she discussed "old school" horse care. A friend of mine and I were bemoaning the lack of such care from years past and , as usual, started talking about the recent trend to bed stalls down with a teeny tiny bit of bedding. Young trainers patiently try to make us believe that rubber mats are good enough. Question is - "do the old school crowd still bed down well? Do you use straw, shavings, pellets or whatever and how much"? TIA

Horse care is an important issue.It is very necessary to care horse well physically and mentally to gain full output from a horse.

Sorry LTC. Even my show horses and training horses stay outside 24-7. I'll trade a few bug bites and scrapes for mentally sound mounts anyday.

No need to apologize-mine was just an open ended question.

My trainer shared her arena and stalls with an old Indian(they both rented houses on the property, so the only option was to share it all, which neither had an issue with) and he bedded down with a mix of straw and shavings. He never used mats that I know of.

Exactly what she said. I have a few horses, one of which is my AQHA show horse and we do some big shows. He is outside 24/7 with the small herd. He does come in with scraped but I just use the Shapley's spray to touch them up and its no big deal. He's fit both mentally and physically and it's great to work off that extra energy too!