lets see those body clips :)

My boy last winter

^^ your pony is so cute !!!

I'm body clipping for fungal reasons.

Also when you work a full-time job and can only ride before work, it helps you be less late to work then you would normally be if your horse cools out faster.

Also we lack warm water at our barn :/

i used a lip twitch. she didnt care about the normal smaller clippers, but the body clippers my friend has are really really noisy. sedation didnt help at all, she just kept fighting it & it had no affect on her at all

Hi, I'll try and answer this question for you as best I can.

Horses have been given a very efficient coat by nature, but nature never did intended horses to be worked hard to the point of sweating in their natural behaviour for hours on end in the way they are asked by us keepers.

The growth cycle of a Horses coat is governed by the amount of daylight hours in a day (hence the winter coat starts to grow in early July after the summer solstice, and the summer coat starts to grow in early January after the winter solstice) in the northern hemisphere .

So why do people clip their horses ?

We ask them to work in varying degrees irrespective of this and they warm up and start sweating very quickly with a rider on their backs (depending on their level of fitness).
If a horse has a full coat of hair 30+mm long, it will hold onto the sweat for over an hour and so you cannot throw a rug on a wet horse and turn it out, as for one reason the salt in the sweat crystalizes in the coat as it dries and will cause irritation under the rug, and if you don't rug your horse, cannot turn it out soaked with sweat as it will get a chill (all horses must be rugged if clipped)

In regard to horses and ponies in competition, if their body temperature goes above normal range, they will struggle to hold their attention (like us humans). If this becomes the case and they overheat, then it is a waste of time entering them in competition as they will never give their best once they get hot apart from it being unfair to work them to this temperature

You see different clips on horses and they are all designed to offer the correct balance between natural protection and avoiding this overheating (and brain cooking).

I have a section on my website which explains this in detail and what sort of clip style people choose, how much natural protection the take away in comparison to human clothing. Why clip ??

If you are not working your horses, they don't need the help of clipping (unless they have cushings disease), but if they are in work, then they and you will benefit from this practice, and this can be done in both the winter and summer depending on climate and workload (eventers clip all year around in the UK)

Lastly, Irrespective of what style or design of clip which people give their horse's and pony's, it is only a haircut, and provided they are properly protected from the elements and managed accordingly it will not be an issue to them.

I have some pictures of custom designs which we have done ourselves and also that I've sent out to people all over the world in my album here for those interested.

Ash

^thanks Sten ... very well said ...

Shan, i feel like your comment was totally not productive.

a horse i used to ride if she wasnt clipped i would have to walk her for upwards of 2 hours. she would still not be all the way dry so i would also have to brush her for a long time. she had sweating issues, but still. most horses that sweat in winter & have hair i usually have to walk and/or groom for at least an hour if they are worked for 45 minutes. that is just impossible when you have other horses to ride & other things to do every day

This is a tricky one. When we started clipping Jessie, she wouldn't stand for clipping with a regular set (she was terrified, and saw off the girl who came down to trace clip her), so my daughter (who is her primary rider/carer) ended up clipping her with some very quiet (human) trimmers as we didn't have anything else to work with, It took ages but it did the trick, and over time we started to introduce louder and bigger ones.

As I see it, the problem with using a twitch or sedation like (sedalin) is that the horses then associate the procedure of clipping with pain or something they don't understand, makes lots of scary noise and can't run from.

We started by turning the trimmers on in her stable, and running them for about 10 minutes nearby whilst grooming her with a brush. Then we moved on to bringing them closer to her when switched off and ran them over her flank whilst reassuring her that they weren't going to eat her.

We did this for a couple of days and then turned them on and brought them closer to her and ran them across her side and all over her whilst turned on so she could hear and feel the vibrations of them without actually clipping (not too close to her head though). We did this a bit more and eventually took a crafty clip of her coat.

If she showed any sign of alarm at any stage, we took a step back and carried on working at this level until she was happy to move on.

Eventually she was happy to stand there and be clipped with the trimmers into a trace (which took an evening), and after a couple of more clips, we re introduced the big clippers again and she was OK with them.

She will happily stand for any length of time to be clipped now and this enabled my daughter to clip a star design all over her over the space of about 3 evenings a couple of years ago (below) as a way of showing off the stencil system (it did grow out very quickly though as it was done in October)



Now bear in mind this was the pony which tried to double barrel the first person who tried to clip her (through fear), she went from that to being so chilled out about the procedure she would allow my daughter to climb underneath her with a pair of trimmers to clip some stars on her belly, it is testament that patience does work!

We as owners will never be able to force these big animals to do anything they are scared of like boxing, clipping, shoeing, jumping, wading etc etc (without a fair amount of cruelty) so we have to work with them and teach them to trust our judgment.

We have found there is little you cannot ask of a horse if the trust is there

wow that's crazy! in an interesting way of course. :P

~AL615

I love the stars!!!!