Equine enrichment is a big deal: an enriched lifestyle is a must for your horse’s mental health and wellbeing. But if you’re scary busy, making time for enrichment can seem impossible. These strategies will help you stay on track with your horse’s enrichment no matter how busy your own life is.
Horse Enrichment Is Important…
We know that enrichment is a must-have. It’s more than cute toys or fun experiences (but it IS super cute and lots of fun!). Enrichment is anything you do or provide that encourages your horse to use their natural behaviors.
Otherwise, the barn and paddock environment doesn’t usually provide much stimulation and opportunity for horses to act like horses.
This means that an enriched lifestyle is a big deal for your horse. It’s more than just boredom relief – enrichment improves the wellbeing of horses in normal situations, and it can be make or break during situations like stall confinement.
…But Are You Too Busy for Enrichment?
Knowing the benefits of enrichment doesn’t change the fact that there are only so many hours a day. Most of us can’t be at the barn all day, or even every day.
Providing enrichment items, arranging special experiences, and working on bigger enrichment projects (giant Spin the Bottle, anyone?) takes time. And horses already take a lot of time, most of which is care and upkeep.
So if you’ve seen pictures and videos of enriched stalls and pastures, or videos of horses loving their toys, it can be discouraging to think that you’ll never be able to provide that kind of enrichment on a consistent basis. Being too busy for equine enrichment is common and happens to all of us from time to time.
The solution? Make horse enrichment work for you by making the process of enrichment smooth and painless. These tips won’t make your job or classes take less time, or make the drive to the stable any shorter. But they do make it possible to quickly and easily give your horse enrichment on a daily basis.
Equine Enrichment Hack #1: Enriched Environments
Making the space do most of the work is the secret sauce to a good equine enrichment program. A complex environment that supports lots of behaviors is the best way to knock out the Five Opportunities to Thrive and raise your horse’s welfare with no other work required.
So if you’re super busy, investing in environment changes is the single best thing you can do to support more natural behavior.
Then, adding fun toys and novel experiences (temporary enrichment) is icing on the cake. And if you can’t spare the time or energy or come out to the stable every day, your horse isn’t left in an empty space with no options.
If your paddocks don’t look like the photo (mine don’t!), there’s a lot you can do to add environmental enrichment in other ways.
Installing permanent or semi-permanent structures is a one-time investment and then the horses can enjoy them whenever they like. These are all features of an enriched environment:
- Moving horses from more stall time to more turnout time
- Group turnout (at least one other horse)
- Scratching posts or scratching pads on walls
- Mud wallows
- Sand stations
- Multiple resting options, including different types of bedding in shelters
- Water features like ponds or multiple water troughs/buckets
- Ground complexity like poles, barrels, and tree trunks to add structure
- Large forage stations to provide constant forage access
If you put your horse into full turnout in a complex environment with at least one other horse, they’ll do 95% of the work for you. The rest is the fun stuff!
If your horse is confined to their stall due to injury, you’ll have more work cut out for you – but there are plenty of efficiency hacks to help.
Equine Enrichment Hack #2: Fast Food Toys
Horse enrichment or equine boredom busters that look like “toys” need to be added and removed regularly to keep them interesting. This is especially true of food and treat toys that can keep your horse occupied for a long period – as long as there’s food.
But adding food to enrichment items takes time, and many of these forage or treat dispensers need to be installed a certain way to work.
Having a base set of the fastest, easiest food toys can be a game changer. Keep them next to the stall or on a communal shelf, sorted together so that all the “instant fixes” are close at hand.
These ideas all utilize the horse’s daily forage or feed, with additional treats optional. This Hay Play ball is a great example because of its easy screw-top lid, making it very fast to fill up. Items like this (which you can find on Amazon) are an investment, but offer huge returns in efficiency and ease of use.
Some of the fastest, low-prep items in my rotation include:
- Hay Pillows, which are easier to open and close than hay nets
- A DIY floor mat slow feeder, like this one made from an old stall mat
- Squashy, flexible Hol-ee Roller balls stuffed with hay
- The Kong Wobbler (a challenging option used with dry pellet feeds)
Equine Enrichment Hack #3: Clips, Ties, and Anchors
Some toys need to be secured to a wall or anchored overhead for safe use. Swinging treat toys are a great example – they aren’t meant to be used on the ground.
To make using these enrichment items fast and easy, install tie rings in your horse’s stall, on outdoor shelter walls, or on fence posts. Use them along with carabiner clips to instantly add or remove toys from the paddock.
This cuts out the time (and irritation!) of tying toys up with knots, and is safer than using long ropes or baling twine.
Don’t forget ground anchors for an easy pasture enrichment hack. They’ve been a game changer for me – no more searching for hay nets that have been tossed into the mud. Place a few in strategic locations and you can add hay nets to a different spot of the paddock each day – instant horse enrichment!
Equine Enrichment Hack #4: Trick Out Your Treats
Feeding and foraging is a hugely important behavior to your horse. That means that encouraging feeding behaviors should be a major part of your enrichment strategy.
Since variety is the spice of life, stock a selection of treat foods and forages for your enrichment items. Keeping them on hand means that you won’t have to add items to your grocery list. Then, keeping them in easy-to-access areas makes loading treats into toys a breeze.
Place treats in your feed room. If you don’t have a used mini fridge, get one! They’re easy to find in your local classifieds and let you keep perishable stuff like veggies, fruits, and licking mat spreads on hand for easy use.
Keep these nonperishable options on hand for adding a ton of variety and interest to your treat toys with little extra effort:
- A few dry cereals like shredded wheat or granola clusters
- Pretzel sticks
- Roasted peanuts in the shell
- Hay pellets
- Commercial horse treats
Equine Enrichment Hack #5: Organize the Stuff
There’s nothing worse than trying to put together a boredom busting toy or enrichment experience for your horse and not being able to find what you need.
Organized enrichment spaces are a game changer. Make a dedicated location like a shelf or bin to hold your toys.
My personal favorite is pegboard, which is ideal for keeping enrichment off the ground and in plain sight so you don’t have to go digging to find what you need:
If you don’t have shelves or pegboard, use a large tote with smaller containers to hold different kinds of enrichment.
It really helps to keep various enrichment options sorted by type or behavior purpose instead of all lumped together. So, try to arrange the space with different sections for your supplies:
- Slow feeders and treat toys
- Sensory items like DIY essential oil spritzers
- Object play toys like tug-and-toss balls
- Materials for built-right-then enrichment like forage boxes, such as packing paper
- Support materials like clips and ties
Equine Enrichment Hack #6: Make a Plan
Nothing beats a pre-made schedule for keeping enrichment on track. Making a schedule or plan for the week or month takes the decision making out of the moment, so you can focus on other tasks.
An enrichment plan doesn’t have to be complicated. It usually looks a lot like a cafeteria menu – showing a few choices for the day that rotate around so that there’s plenty of variety.
Use your favorite planner to chart out enrichment plans for your horse and you’ll be on track to providing max variety and stimulation as well as working enrichment into your busy schedule.
If you don’t have an equestrian planner on hand, this line of horse training planners comes in 2023 and undated versions, and contains space for your horse’s enrichment items.
Too Busy for Horse Enrichment? Not Anymore!
After streamlining your routine, providing enriching experiences can become a normal part of your horse care instead of an additional demand on your time. And you can use the time saved to bond with your horse, try a new training method like positive reinforcement, or make new, interesting enrichment items for them to enjoy.
Happy enriching!