This study looked how varying the position of feed, water and shelter changed how horses spend their time, and the knock on effects on their grazing behaviours.

This is important because while fresh pasture provides a number of health and mental benefits for our horses, horses can also be quite damaging to the land, quickly creating soil compaction and having a tendency to overgraze preferred plants. The authors hypothesised that horse grazing behaviour could be influenced (ultimately to protect the land) by moving their feed, water and/or shelter - this has been shown in other livestock species - so why not horses!

The research was done with six horses (small studies are typical due to costs in equine research!) in South Carolina. The horses grazed in pairs across 6 paddock sections which had three different feed/water/shelter configurations, over four time periods of seven days each (yes, I was confused too) - basically each pair of horses spent a week in each of the configurations, plus some extra randomisation to increase the statistical strength of the study. Each section was just under 1ha for the two horses, which seems a reasonable stocking rate, and half the area was rested at any one point. Clear as mud?

More importantly, what were the results? 

• Pasture sampling - they took grass analyses in each period, and found some minor changes in pasture that could be associated with the season (late summer through autumn), the authors did not think this was related to the experiment at hand - and I tend to agree!

• Horse location via GPS - interestingly they did find differences in the horses locations depending on the configuration - even though the different configurations don't seem that different to me (all triangular, nothing too creative!). 

  • Horses tended to spend more time near all three elements than not near them, with the feeder being the favourite area (14% of time), followed by the water (10.4%) and shelter (9.4%).

  • Configuration 2-B and Configuration 3-A (check the drawing) seemed to encourage horses to spend more time congregating around the feeder than other configurations.

  • Shelters were not sought out during this experiment due to mild conditions, which is a bit of flaw in the design here.

  • As is already well known, horses spent most of their time grazing in all scenarious (almost 77% of the time), followed by standing/resting (11%), moving around (5%) and eating their feed (3%) none of this was affected by changing the position of the feeders, waters or shelters - horses will still be horses!

So what? All in all, not a life changing study, but as there is very little data on this sort of thing in horses, it's a good start. Basically they have shown that horses will congregate around the feeder, and that moving things around won't change their basic grazing behaviours (and therefore won't have any negative impact on their health or wellbeing).

What this means in practice is that if you have an area in a paddock that has been overgrazed in the past and is struggling with compaction (or was maybe a track or similar) you can passively decrease horse traffic in that area by putting your supplementary feeding area somewhere else. To flip that scenario, you could also use this method to encourage horses to spend more time in an area that needs more grazing (longer mature grasses).

And of course what this really hammers home that if you are going to feed your horses in a set place all the time (let's face it, that's generally the most convenient thing to do!) that place will become degraded over time - so best practice would be to turn this into a dry lot area with all their feed, water and shelter in one spot to reduce the area of impact.

Perron, Brittany S., et al. "Configuration of Feed, Shelter, and Water Affects Equine Grazing Distribution and Behaviors: Equine Grazing Distribution and Behaviors." International Journal of Equine Science 2.1 (2023): 1-8.