Building a temporary horse stable

Fine horses need good housing conditions or else they will become sick easily. Therefore we have built a temporary stable inside the corral of our friend Carlos where the two Peruvian mares are staying temporarily.

The stable is a simple shed with metal roof. It’s made in a way that we can disassemble it quickly and move it elsewhere on our trailer.

For now this will serve us for a while as horse shelter. Later on this segment and another of equal size will become an outdoor workshop on the farm.

Diadema and Topacio got fresh water and swazy hay and as you can see in the picture they are both happily feeding themselves.

However we noticed some interesting behavior and hopefully this will not turn out to be trouble. The smaller Topacio (on the right) is kind of afraid of the larger Diadema. The larger one doesn’t like the smaller Topacio next to her when feeding. So Topacio quickly shys away and waits for Diadema to finish - and she does so with some submissive body expression. We observed that before and therefore put hay left and right of the water tank so that both mares can feed at the same time without pulling rank on eachother.

For the real stable this means that we have to build boxes with doors for each horse. Other issues might arise and it appears that one needs a way to keep horses separate from eachother for while. I think for cold blooded horses that’s not really necessary - I’ve never seen that anywhere here in Panama - but for hot blooded horses it’s probably a good idea.

Maybe some fellow horseman can comment on that. I’d appreciate that.