Are you searching for stall enrichment inspiration? Need to occupy a bored horse? Try scent enrichment! Adding scent with essential oils for horses gives your equine friend variety and some of the benefits of aromatherapy. With these DIY essential oil sprays for horses, scent enrichment for your horse is quick and easy. Here’s how to make ultra simple, budget friendly spritzers that you can use for equine sensory enrichment.
What are Essential Oils for Horse Enrichment?
An essential oil spray is a pump sprayer that lets you apply an essential oil blend to any surface with just a quick spritz.
Essential oils are highly concentrated plant-based oils. They contain a plant’s unique scent profile and other compounds. Humans and horses may find these botanical scents pleasant, interesting, or calming.
Essential oils for horses are a great source of scent for aromatherapy or equine scent enrichment. But since they’re highly concentrated, you’ll need a way to dilute and apply them to surfaces like your horse’s stall scent board.
These handy essential oil sprays are a perfect way to use essential oils for your horse. These little spritz bottles are perfect for saving space and making scent enrichment easy.
Why are Essential Oil Sprays Good Enrichment for Horses?
Essential oil sprays make scent enrichment for horses quick and easy.
Why scent enrichment? It’s an easy way to add variety to your horse’s stall, and also gives your horse important sensory variety.
Sensory enrichment gives your horse the chance to use their senses when they’re in the stall or pasture. Stalls are especially sensory-poor places. This means that they don’t have much variety of new or different things to see, touch, taste, hear, and smell.
A long-term deficiency of sensory variety can contribute to behavior problems. In other words, not having enough sensory enrichment isn’t good for your horse’s mental health! If you’re committed to making stall time better for your horse and providing good equine welfare, sensory enrichment is a must-have.
Essential oils for horses have other benefits when used in aromatherapy. Here, they just provide an easy to way to give your horse more sensory input.
These little essential oil sprays are great enrichment for horses because you can make them in any combination of scents to add plenty of scent variety to your horse’s stall. As part of an overall enrichment plan, your essential oil spray kit can keep your horse engaged and boredom-free.
Scent Enrichment for Horse Owners on a Budget
This DIY horse scent enrichment kit has a lot going for it for you, too. The scent spritzers are fast and easy to make. They’re clean and cute, and don’t take up much room in the stable or tack box.
Toys and puzzles definitely have their place, but one perk of the essential oil sprays for horse enrichment is that it’s a non-food enrichment activity. Not every enrichment has to involve forage or treats.
They’re very budget friendly – your main investment will be purchasing an essential oil kit, but you’ll get a LOT of mileage out of it. You can make this scent enrichment and save your budget for more horse toys.
What Horse Behaviors Do the Essential Oil Sprays Encourage?
Remember, enrichment is all about encouraging your horse’s natural behaviors. The sense spritzers are an excellent sensory enrichment that will encourage your horse to use their sense of smell.
When you give your horse scent enrichment, you’ll see some sniffing, and sometimes your horse may stand next to the scented item and just appear to enjoy breathing in the smell. Sometimes, your horse will curl their lip and make a silly face. This is called the Flehmen response, and your horse does this when they smell something new or especially interesting.
Rarely, you might use a scent that your horse does not enjoy. After all, we don’t love every smell either! They may choose to avoid the scent board or cushion, or even put back their ears when they first get a whiff.
How to Make Essential Oil Sprays for Horse Enrichment
Making these sprays couldn’t be easier. Most of the work is in gathering all your ingredients.
You will need:
- One essential oil kit
- A few miniature pump sprayers
- A bottle of plain vodka or other flavorless grain alcohol
Step 1: Gather Ingredients
These miniature pump sprayers are perfect for making essential oil sprays for your horse. At just a few ounces in capacity, they’re economical to fill with essential oil and carrier alcohol.
The vodka is a flavorless, scentless carrier for the essential oils. It preserves the essential oils’ scents and diffuses the smell as it evaporates.
The essential oil kit is the main ingredient for these easy DIY scent spritzers (the link is the brand used in this tutorial). Essential oil kits come in many sizes, or you can mix and match by buying single bottles from a local supplier.
It’s important to get a high quality kit for this enrichment. Quality, concentrated essential oils will give you the best scent enrichment for your horse. Low quality oils may already be diluted, or have incorrect or artificial scents.
Step 2: Add the Alcohol Carrier to the Sprayers
Make sure your spray bottles are clean. Using a funnel or carefully pouring by hand, add vodka to each bottle until they’re about 3/4 full.
You can always add a touch more vodka to completely fill the bottle once you’ve added the oil, but do leave some airspace. The air bubbles will work to emulsify the oil when you shake before spraying in your horse’s stall.
Step 3. Add or Combine Essential Oils for Your Horse
For each spritz bottle you’ll need anywhere from 10 to 20 drops of essential oil. Horses have a sensitive sense of smell, so a little essential oil goes a long way! I usually find them perfect at about 10 drops of oil.
When deciding on scent combinations, test each bottle after adding about 10 drops, and then decide if you need more. Remember that it’s 10 to 20 drops total if you’re making a combination, not 10-20 drops of each.
Try different combinations, or add a single scent at a time. The essential oils for horse enrichment are unique to each equine, so experiment!
Step 4. Close and Shake the Scent Sprayers
Before using your oil sprayers, put the caps on the bottles, make sure everything is closed securely, and shake the bottle vigorously. You’ll see the liquid turn from clear to cloudy. This is because as you shake, you’re breaking the the oil into tinier and tinier droplets until they’re microscopic.
These two-ingredient spritzers don’t contain an emulsifier to force the oil to stay mixed. The essential oil will gradually float to the top over time – so before you use your essential oil sprays for horse enrichment, give them a shake.
All of your bottles will look the same once you’ve finished, so don’t forget to label the bottles! You can also color code the essential oil by adding a tiny amount less than a drop of food coloring – cute but optional.
And that’s it! Now it’s time to use your scent spritzers.
Using Essential Oil Sprays for Horse Enrichment
You can use your scent spritzers anywhere you want a dash of aromatherapy for your horse. The best way to use the scent spritzers is with a scent board, in the stall or up on a pasture wall. A DIY scent board gives you a dedicated location for scent enrichment. Your horse can approach the board at any time and enjoy the smell variety.
Don’t spray your horse directly, and don’t use your essential oil spritzers near their food or water. Essential oils are not edible. The small amount of oil in one spritz won’t be harmful, but could discourage your horse from eating or drinking the scented food. Scent enrichment is best when horses have choice and control over whether they sniff or not.
If you don’t have a scent board, you can spray a fabric cushion and hang it on the other side of the stall’s bars. Just a few pumps are all you need – this is a high-mileage DIY enrichment.
Related Enrichment Ideas
Essential oil sprays for scent enrichment are a sensory enrichment activity for your horse. They also help provide variety and relieve boredom. Try these ideas for related inspiration:
The DIY Scent Board – the perfect surface for using scent enrichment
Sensory Texture Board for another DIY activity – giving your horse texture variety
Stall Enrichment and Boredom Busting – for all the stall toys and puzzles for stall time
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