How Can Colic Be Prevented?

There is no definite solution that will eliminate the possibility of colic for our horses. But what we can do is to create an environment which will minimize the risk for our equine partners.

Let's look at the causes and figure out how to mitigate each one.

Dehydration:

This is not only the most common cause but also the easiest to mitigate. Make sure that your horses have plenty of clean water available at all times. Sounds simple, right? Well it's not as simple as it might seem. I'm sure you've heard the saying "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink." That is oh, so true. So we have to make the water as attractive to our horses as possible.

If your horse is in the stall, make sure the bucket is always available and it is clean. Stall buckets should be dumped out every day and refilled. Depending on how much of a messy eater your horse is it may also need to be scrubbed every day. My Welsh pony constantly dunks his hay, whether I wet the hay first or not, so I have to scrub his bucket every day. My QH mare will not drink from a bucket in the stall and prefers to drink from a trough outside so her water is constantly covered with a scum of dust from the air, the bedding, the hay, whatever we all know that barns are dusty places. Her bucket needs to be dumped and refilled but usually, swishing the water around before it gets dumped will be enough to clean her bucket.

There are a million ways your horse can contaminate its bucket so keeping it clean is a problem that must be addressed. At the bare minimum, a stall bucket needs to be dumped and refilled once daily and scrubbed weekly. Barn workers will often resist this chore, as it is certainly a time consuming task (on our farm with around 40 horses in stalls, it can be very time consuming indeed!) but in a colic avoidance mode, it is critical.

There is also the question of quantity. If you don't have automatic waterers, then you need to keep track during the day to make sure that each horse has water all day. If you have a horse that drinks a lot of water, make sure that horse has 2 or 3 buckets in the stall and that each one is clean and full every day.

If you do have automatic waterers, make sure you activate each one every day and clean out the reservoir in each stall. Even in the cleanest barn, those little bowls that the horse actually drinks from will become at best dusty and at worst contaminated.

In winter,

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