Mares & Geldings

roxy007

roxy007

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Are there likely to be any problems in keeping a gelding with three mares. My mare is a real flirt when other geldings are in adjoining paddocks and they seem to bring her into season. When she's like this she isn't mean to me just that she kind of ignores me or lets me do what I have to do and then tears of up the field to stand at the fence line with the geldings. She doesn't nap badly when they are there just calls to them a lot until they are out of sight. I wondered if I would be creating a bigger problem by buying a gelding and although he'd be in the next paddock for a while the idea would be to have them all together. Any advice much appreciated.
 
IMO you are far better off having single sex herds.. If i had a mare then she would be in a seperate field to my boys.
My mare was in a mixed sex herd and ended up being PTS with a broken leg after a punchup occured when the girls were all flirty in season.
 
I guess it's a very personal decision hazydaze and there have been other threads about this quite recently. Some yards/owners insist on single sex groups or even single occupancy fields. Others find that carefully matched and balanced mixed sex groups work well. The way I see it, a horse could get kicked by another of the same sex just as easily or indeed could get a nasty injury just from being on his own in a field. What I would say is that unless you know the horses well, 1 gelding and 3 mares sounds a bit iffy. The mares may all get the hots for the gelding and scuffles and scraps could easily start. At our yard, the YO wisely tries to make sure that there is a better balance than that ie a similar number of mares to geldings or at least more than 1 of each sex. I guess horses will always find new ways of injuring themselves so its up to us to minimise the risks whilst still allowing the horse to be a horse.
 
My gelding can go in with mares, by himself, but he will not tolerate having another gelding in with 'his' mares.

Its a difficult one, personally I prefer sep fields for mares and geldings, just in case.

Accidents can unfortunately happen, but if we can reduce the chances then it only makes sense.
 
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