Lots of Elbow Grease for Disinfection Project

Disease outbreaks are dangerous to the health of your horses and can be disastrous for your business.
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Lots of Elbow Grease for Disinfection Project
Cleaning a stall takes detergent and manual labor. | Photo: The Horse Staff

Cleaning out the garage. Sorting through all the “stuff” in the attic. Shampooing the entire house’s carpeting. What could be a worse assignment? All of those tasks require lots of time, hard work, and are few people’s entertainment-of-choice for a weekend. Most horse people would rather saddle soap every saddle and piece of leather they own, or even wash and wax the horse trailer.

There is one horse-related duty that ranks right up there (on most people’s scale) with the above dreaded assignments–cleaning and disinfecting stalls. Who wants to strip totally every stall in a barn, wash, disinfect, and re-bed them all? That is a lot of labor most people would gladly put off for a nice trail ride. Plus, it’s not really necessary, or is it? Put yourself in these situations:

You are the owner of a boarding stable with 35 horses, primarily pleasure horses used for trail riding. After some horses return from a weekend ride, two horses develop profuse diarrhea. The veterinarian suspects salmonellosis and two days later confirms the diagnosis

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Written by:

Roberta Dwyer, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVPM, is an equine extension veterinarian and professor at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, where she also serves as director of the preveterinary advising program. She specializes in veterinary preventative medicine.

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