Boulty
Well-Known Member
The owner of the yard I'm on keeps his like this mostly. He has about 20 and I'd say maybe about half of them are broken in (rest are youngsters) but generally there's only a couple of them in work at any one time and they don't do much over winter. He has mostly mares and a couple of geldings. He has brought a few into a barn for the winter that tend to drop weight and does sometimes stable his driving horses when he's working them every day but the rest are out on about 80 acres with a few bales of haylage a week going in. There's a couple of us on livery but most of the liveries stable at least part of the time in winter (Mine would love to winter out but doesn't hold his weight well enough unless haylage is 100% adlib so he comes in about 8 hours a day for extra rations and feeds). There's a few areas of woodland for shelter plus plenty of hedges and a river runs along the bottom of one field (some of them go and paddle in that in summer). They all seem very content most of the time although they do tend towards fence destruction around the time the grass starts to drop off and the hay needs to start going in though. Mine seems to thrive on having so many friends to play with. I do agree with what someone said about the geldings seeming to play more than the mares though (said as the owner of a gelding who has learnt to play-fight since going there... never really used to bother so much at previous yards)
Winter was a smaller sacrifice area where they'd be given hay. Since then mine have mostly lived in several acre fields with only one or two others.