Short Coats In 60 Days!

Everyone loves a horse show ready coat during winter. Doesn’t matter if you are a roper heading to Arizona in the winter, or a cutter planning to show all season long. Here are a few tips to enable you and your horse to look slick this winter!

1.) Light your stalls: Yes, that’s right! You’re gonna need to have your horse enclosed to be able to control the variables. You’re going to need to have lights run longer than daylight in order to produce artificial summer lighting. The ideal time to have your horse exposed to lights is 16 hours a day. Best way to ensure timing is to use a plugin timer that will turn your lights on and off during the night. Horses do need their dark time during the night too. Running your lights all night long will produce no short coat.

2.) Keep it bright: Make sure you use enough lighting in your stalls. Sometimes this means using more than one light source in a stall. If overhead lighting is not an option for you, using adjacent corners to hang lights works well. Make sure you have it bright enough, we recommend having a 200 watt bulb in your fixtures to ensure enough light.

3.) Be patient: It will take right around 60 days for a horses coat to alter from long to short. Right now days are getting shorter so the sooner you get on the lighting schedule the more likely you are to not grow long annoying winter coats.

4.) Keep your horse warm: Now that you have slicked off show hair, make sure to keep your horse warm. I always use a slinky, sheet then a winter coat (or two) to keep my show horses warm on cold days and nights.

5.) Things to think about: Heating bulbs are very dangerous, stay away from them in your barns. Make sure the lights and cords are out of reach of your horses.