SARAH: "As it relates to horse health,
what are the pros and cons of straw bedding?"
An unexpected question.
DR LYDIA GRAY: It is.
And it's unexpectedly controversial.
SARAH: Ooh, I like it.
DR LYDIA GRAY: You think, straw bedding, it's just a substance,
there's facts.
Well, there's a lot of opinions, too, when it comes
to what to bed horses with.
Because there's the straw that's very traditional.
You see it in a lot of racetrack barns with broodmares.
There's wood shavings, wood pellets, even sawdust.
At my barn, we use flax.
You can buy hemp.
There's sand.
You can bed horses on sand if you do it carefully.
Peat moss is popular in some areas.
So a lot of it has to do with availability, right, cost,
delivery, storage.
The cleaning style and the utensils, the equipment
you need is very different.
The disposal, like some places you can spread it in fields,
you can sell it to other places.
Some places you can put it in landfills.
I mean, you can compost it.
So there's a lot of opinions and preferences.
A lot of it comes down to preferences.
There is some scientific facts and research
about straw and some others.
Some people think that straw is very-- it can
be very clean and dust free.
However, for the researchers who are studying airway disease,
respiratory inflammation, when they want to challenge a horse
and create the allergic signs-- the coughing and the heavy
breathing so that they can then try a treatment to see if it
works--
they bed them on straw.
So that says, if you already have
a horse that has a respiratory illness,
straw maybe is not a good choice.
A lot of people have gone to the shredded paper or cardboard.
That's very, very clean.
You learn how to clean the stall, the wet and the dry
with it and then how to dispose of it.
I will say, personal experience, because I have
a horse with airway disease.
I put the paper bedding in the trailer as my travel bedding.
And that wasn't a good choice because it's very light.
SARAH: No?
So when the windows open, it's--
DR LYDIA GRAY: And it blows away.
Yeah.
SARAH: I can only imagine what you looked
at when you opened the door.
DR LYDIA GRAY: It was kind of a mess.
So it's good in the stall.
SARAH: Poor Newman.
DR LYDIA GRAY: And in the stall even you
might have to just dampen it with like a watering can
or a hose on mist or something.
So there's the dust and the mold aspect.
And that's a big one.
The other is, it's potentially edible for horses
that might not be so picky, might be on a diet,
and they're like, "Huh, roughage, I'll
just nibble on this."
And you think, on the one hand, that's OK.
It's just sort of, you know, filler.
But it is so stemmy that it tends to cause impactions.
And that's not something you want.
So that's worrisome.
And then it's not very absorbable.
Straw is great for cushion and padding.
But you have to bed super, super deep.
And then you have to learn how to clean
a super deep bedded stall.
But still, the urine doesn't get absorbed by the straw.
It travels down and is underneath it.
So then if you have a nice mat or mattress, even of straw,
they don't ever touch that urine.
But you have to bed so deep for them not to get wet from it.
SARAH: Right, right.
DR LYDIA GRAY: So some people just
can't deal with that issue of it in general.
And they skip straw.
But if it works for you, great.
If it's not in your horse's best interest for medical reasons,
there's lots of good alternatives.
SARAH: Awesome.
One thing I want to call out from your answer
because I know it's important to you personally--
DR LYDIA GRAY: OK.
SARAH: --you mentioned that in some areas,
you can dispose of it by spreading it on a field.
You never spread manure on a field
that the horses go out in.
DR LYDIA GRAY: No, not-- never a live grazed field.
SARAH: Yes, because that would be potential to spread
parasites to those horses.
Because by spreading the manure, you're
just spreading the parasites right
where the horses are grazing, which is exactly what they want
and not what we want.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Right, right.
SARAH: So if you have, like, farming fields
and you want to spread it as a fertilizer,
depending on your bedding source,
that's great, never for grazing.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Right.
SARAH: I didn't want you--
DR LYDIA GRAY: Thank you for bringing that up.
SARAH: I didn't want you to watch it later and be
like, what have I done?
DR LYDIA GRAY: Oh!
[LAUGHS]