Natural Horse Boarding

We offer pasture board on our 15 acre farm in Upper Marlboro,  Maryland.  What is natural horse boarding?  It is an attempt to keep horses as close to the way they live in the wild as we can while maintaining their mental and physical health.  Horses are prey animals that prefer living out in the open.  They normally roam many miles in the course of a day, foraging as they go.  They are not accustomed to being kept in small boxes, often in closed up, dusty barns, and being given concentrated feed twice a day.

Here is an excellent link that offers a lot of resources as well as advice and explanations of the Paddock Paradise system: Paddock Paradise Wiki

This is a method of keeping horses active on a smaller property.  I do not currently have a track system set up, as I have plenty of space for the horses I have.  However, I really like a lot of the concepts, including enrichment ideas, slow feeders, and obstacles.

The following was taken from www.equusite.com, which is a wonderful resource of useful information.  Please click the title to read the entire article at it's location.

Living Requirements for Horses

WRITTEN BY: Cheryl Sutor   [July 5, 2002]

In today's world, a very large percentage of conventional boarding environments are based more and more on the needs of the horse owners than on the needs of the horse. These sacrifices, which are generally done to make horse keeping more "convenient", are instigating health problems and reducing the horse's lifespan and natural healing abilities.

Most horse owners do not realize that the horse is very much different from ourselves. We need to start taking the horse's natural lifestyle into account and stop "humanizing" them. For example: Many horse owners believe that their horse is most comfortable in a stall deeply bedded with shavings or straw. However, this is not true (explained below). The horse does not find comfort in many of the things that we conventionally provide it.

This article is intended to help you, as a horse owner or student, to understand the proper natural environment in which horses are born to live in. After all, the horse's environment plays the key role in it's overall health and lifespan, and we all want the very best for our much-loved horses.