What a horrible way to go. The owners failed to consider how much water horses can drink - especially in the heat. We have two mares in a pen with a 100 gallon water tank and have to fill it every day. No - it doesn't leak - they just drink that much - it gets HOT here in Oklahoma!
This is the next town over from me and when i saw it on the news i was just devastated. I am already a worry wart about water and now i am even more sensitive after this!
The google search I did came up with the average horse drinks (on average) 6 gallons of water per day.
Which does make sense since so many boarding barns the horses have one five gallon bucket that gets filled 2x per day and that is enough for most of them.
My one horse is a serious over achiever in the drinking department and he drinks about 15 gallons per day.
This time of year (hot summer) he easily does 20 gallons.
Very sad about these horses suffering with out water.
I thought it said at the end that they were trying to determine who owned them. Then it said they figured out who owned the land and were working on finding the horses owners.
I've thought about it - I know of people who use them in the HUGE stock tanks, but I don't know about the little 100 gallon ones. Then again, it wouldn't be too hard to net them out of the tank to give it a good cleaning once in a while, either.
I wonder if seeing the fish in the water would keep Dancer out of it? She LOVES to get in the water and PLAY!
Dancer gets her whole front end in the tank. The rest of her would follow if it were big enough. She splashes water all over the place. One of these days she'll knock a hole in the tank and I'll have to get a new one, but what can you do? Oh well. I'll try putting a few goldfish in there, but if Dancer cuts loose again, we may have fishmash in the tank!
Gambusia are another name for mosquito fish. They are small, and look like guppies.
Goldfish are carp - at least the ones I've had are. They're bottom feeders, but I doubt they'd hesitate to take a mosquito larvae if it was handy. They will eat algae, too (being carp), but if you have too many of them, the algea will grow faster than they can keep up with, hence nasty tanks.
I'm not really going to put any in my tank - the horses dump too much garbage in there and the water would be too low in oxygen for them. They are really only good in the really huge stock tanks.
^ maybe the Walmart goldfish are hard core or starved- haha ... or maybe I am not getting goldfish but something i think is a goldfish? Anywho it doesn't matter
That article is so, so sad. I hope they find the owners of the horses and prosecute to full extent of the law.
I have 7 horses (my 6 and Amarea's horse) drinking out of a 150g stocktank. I have used goldfish in the past, but don't anymore. with this many horses drinking out of the tank, they can drink it more than 3/4 down by mid-afternoon most hot days. I dump the tank, spray it out, and refill. I also add about 4 cups ACV to the water every dump/refill, keeps away the mosquito larvae and also helps somewhat with inside-out fly control with the horses, as well as encouraging them to drink more.
for tanks in direct sunlight algae grows 2 times faster , under the shade and with fish and you have a chance. I keep a seive ( strainer) at the buckets and troff and scoop out extra hay and leaves. This keeps the tank pretty clean, and the horses from coughing on a bug. every week I drain it and let it sit in the sun to dry out the algae, or if I have had a red bull Iattack it with a pot scrubber.Algae or misquitoes , I dont want my kids drinking either...actually we dont have misquitoes here we are too high up and at the wrong temp for them , no west nile either , big sigh of relief !
this is ridiculous, I clean and refill all water bins at least once a day.
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