Herd turnout -intro

We tend to remove the more bossy horses and pop the newbie in with the gentle souls. Ideally we'd do this for a few days, bringing the new horse in for easy hay and water overnight (esp at this time of year!). Then we introduce the bossies one by one, finally leaving everyone out together. It depends on the newbie. Some instantly bond with the gentle souls and it's like the bossies never even notice they exist or are new. It can take as a little as one day for those ones. But with a new bossy horse or one that has previous trauma with herds/other horses, it can take two weeks to keep things stress free. What I don't ever want to see is ganging up on a newbia, chasing into a fence/gate, or the newbie hanging out getting anxious and hungry as they don't know what to do with themselves. For these reasons, spring introductions on grass are the easiest (many hormones but also much space and delicious grass), followed by winter introductions as they have ad lib hay in the field and usually too lazy to mess about in the deeper mud. Summer, they can be hot, bothered, inclined to defend their favourite patch of land ....


Aaaanyway all that to say that if this herd is used to horses joining, then it will probably be fine, provided your gelding doesn't turn up with Big Ideas on day 1.
 
Caol Ila said:
Current yard just wings them in. It surprisingly works more often than it doesn't. I do have a story about a certain fence jumping incident.... Everything is a single sex herd, though.
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Have done this before - typically watch them for 20-30 mins and if ok, then would leave them to it. Never had an issue but maybe have always had well socialized horses
 
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