How to Train Horses to Keep their Stalls Clean

In the wild, equine stallions will defecate on the manure piles left by their equine mares to hide the scent from other stallions.

Also, when young stallions are still living in a bachelor herd they will often compete to be the last to defecate on a manure pile, thereby showing dominance by covering the scent of the other bachelor stallions. These manure piles are known as “stud piles.”

This behavior is caused by testosterone, so it is found mostly in stallions and geldings. Mares only produce a small amount of testosterone, giving them the tendency to keep a dirtier stall.

It’s important to remember that anatomy plays a part in a stall’s cleanliness as well. Mares will often urinate along the back or side walls of their stalls, while stallions and geldings will usually urinate towards the middle of their stalls.

Train your horse to keep their stall clean. This is done simply by changing the way you clean their stall. It could take awhile for your horse to learn this, but you should start to see a difference within a few months.

horse stall

Muck out your horse’s stall as you normally would.
Rake any clean, leftover bedding to the very back of the stall. Leave a few small fragments (3-4 pieces that are no bigger than a quarter) of manure along the back wall.
Add fresh bedding in front of the older bedding. Make sure you don’t add so much that the horse can kick large amounts of it towards the front of the stall.
Leave the front half of the stall completely bare! There should only be bedding in the back half of the stall.

This works because horses don’t like their urine splashing up on their legs when they urinate, so they learn pretty quickly to urinate in the back half of the stall where the bedding is. The little bits of manure in the back encourage the natural behavior of horses defecating on existing manure piles.

Once the horse’s cleanliness has improved, you can stop leaving the manure fragments in the back of the stall. You can also start adding bedding to the front half of the stall if you wish. However, you may wish to continue cleaning your stall this way as it actually saves you bedding since you are only bedding half the stall.

This method has worked wonderfully for me with both mares and geldings (the stallions already kept clean stalls), but not all horses can be taught to do their business in certain areas. Some horses just like to drag their feet around and mix together the contents of their stalls. However, even with the worst horses you should see some improvement.

Have a great day with your horse. Reader comments or suggestions are welcome!

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