Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives



Hi Maryanne, Jay,

 

Well, yes, I partly agree, but if horses are intended for real sport, then we have to give them all chances to succeed. It is true that if you clip a horse before a race in winter, you will have to play with blankets for the whole winter afterwards.

 

That's the price to pay. All my working horses here are clipped and I can tell you that it is frezing (-10 ° centigrades one week ago). Otherwise no way to do serious things : you get cramps, you get gale girths with accumulated sweat on long hairs, you get caugh because horses were not getting dry fast enough, and the list goes on...

 

Leonard

www.endurance-belgium.com

 

But some of these horses are living outdoors in places where winter really is WINTER. Even here in Egypt having my horses outdoors at 24/7 I don't clip them. We might be able to do so since the lowest temps are about 5 to 10 C (quite above freezing) in the winter, but then I might have to blanket them or something and blankets are a pain to find here.

Quite a lot of the horses in the US if they are coming from the midwest or even parts of the southwest are dealing with temperatures below freezing and they aren't living in boxes at all. I probably wouldn't clip either with that weather.

Maryanne