Why blanket your horse in the winter

To help your horse live comfortably in cold weather, make sure calories are adequate; most important, provide sufficient forage, typically in the form of hay. As the horse digests forage, gut activity warms the body. This function, along with the natural insulating abilities of the winter coat, allows your horse to live comfortably in an environment that is not excessively cold, assuming shelter is available.

The decision to blanket your horse comes with pros and cons. A positive aspect of blanketing is that it helps maintain a short-haired show coat, thus decreasing your body clipping time if you are showing during the colder months.

Performance horses may need clipping and blanketing to control winter hair growth, so they can exercise without getting too sweaty and so that sweat dries easily.

Consider a partial rather than a full clip for the benefits of easily cleaned sweaty areas and heavy hair coat in other areas. Blankets also are used in icy and snowy weather to keep your outside horse clean and dry, ready for you to ride. Additionally, when a horse is moved from a warm climate to a much cooler climate, a blanket can help the horse become acclimated to the new environment.

Properly cleaning blankets is recommended for longevity of the product, but remember that most are line-dried, so either purchase a quick-drying blanket or have a backup.

Horses built like radiators, long and flat, are more apt to feel the cold. The process of digesting fiber also produces heat. This is why horses need more feed during cold weather. The smaller the horse, the greater the increase required. Horses are less active in winter. This helps them conserve energy. Yes, they may run around briefly to warm up, but for horses kept naturally, winter is a time to stand around, share body heat with a buddy, and catch some rays on the south side of the barn.

So horses are superbly equipped to deal with cold and storms. Blanketing messes with some of their hard-won adaptations. While your house might have zone heating, your horse does not. In trying to warm exposed areas while blanketed, the horse can overheat and sweat under the material. The blanket then prevents the hair from air-drying, and the horse can end up getting chilled.

Constant blanketing can cause the hair erector muscles to become weak through lack of use. The same thing goes for the muscles that constrict and dilate the arteries.

Bottom line: if you blanket them, they will need to be blanketed. Of course, horses have opinions about all this. A recent Norwegian study trained 23 horses to use abstract symbols to request a blanket be put on, taken off, or no change. They most often requested to have blankets removed, and were usually found to be sweating underneath them, though the day was cool. Horses often take matters into their own teeth, and having removed a blanket through some Houdini-like maneuver, discover what these expensive items may be best for — shaking, running with, and playing tug-of-war.

Lifelong horse lover Jessie Haas is the author of 38 previous books, including many children's books focused on girls and horses. Haas lives in rural Vermont… See Bio. I describe to myself how I feel about the world What you'll … Read More. How much cold can a horse tolerate?

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