Old Bones, Deep Beds: Bedding a Veteran Horse on Hemp Through the Cold Months

There is a point with an older horse where bedding stops being housekeeping and starts being nursing. I reached it in October, watching a 24-year-old mare take three goes to get her hind end organised for a lie-down in a bed of shavings that had gone thin and dusty by the third morning. We moved her onto hemp for the winter as much as an experiment as anything. These are the notes, kept honestly.

Why the bed matters more to a veteran than to a five-year-old

A young horse will kip down on most things. An older one, particularly one with arthritic hocks or a bit of kissing spine, has a cost-benefit calculation going on every time it lies down: is getting back up worth it? Horses need proper recumbent sleep, and the ones that stop getting it look flat, sour and stiff. So the bed is not a comfort extra — it is part of the daily management of joint pain.

What you are trying to do is reduce the pressure on hocks, fetlocks and the point of the hip when she is down, and give her something with grip and spring to push against when she gets up. Hemp does both reasonably well. What it does not do is manage itself, and that is the bit the marketing tends to skip.

What hemp actually delivered

Absorbency was the headline. She is a messy mare — one to box-walk and muck up in a pattern — and hemp held the wet far better than shavings, with no ammonia smell rising at the door by Thursday. On a cold morning, a bed that does not stink is a bed you will actually muck out properly, which is half the battle.

Dust was the other win. She coughs when the shavings are fresh. Hemp out of the bale was quiet.

Cushioning was good but not bottomless. A hemp bed packs down firm under weight, especially once it is damp, so you get a firm, springy surface rather than a fluffy one. For a horse with sore hocks, firm-but-yielding beats deep-and-slack every time.

And the honest downside: hemp muck is heavy. A full barrow of wet hemp is noticeably harder work than the equivalent in shavings, and the muck heap grows at a different rate. If you are the only person mucking out six boxes, factor your own back into the decision.

Depth: the number that matters most

I settled on a base of roughly eight to ten centimetres of packed hemp over rubber matting, with banks up the walls. Not a foot of loose stuff.

That is deliberate. A deeply loose bed looks lovely and sympathetic, but a veteran with weak hind limbs can genuinely struggle to get up out of it — the legs sink, the grip is inconsistent, and she ends up scrambling. A firm, level base with grip is kinder than a soft mound. If she is really weak behind, mats plus a modest hemp layer, kept level, is safer than a picture-book deep litter.

Loose daily, lifted weekly. Hemp rewards routine; left alone it goes solid and dark and stops being a bed and starts being a floor.

Managing the wet ones and the messy ones

Older mares can develop a bit of incontinence, and geldings with a weak bladder are not unknown either. Hemp will cope with a surprising amount of this, but it needs turning rather than topping. My routine became: skip out the droppings every morning, lift the wet patches every second day, and do a proper full muck out and top-up every ten days rather than trying to stretch it to three weeks.

Two practical notes. Keep the muck heap well away from the stable, because wet hemp muck is heavy and you will not want to re-wheel it. And if your horse is an inveterate box-walker, consider a strip of matting at the door — wet hemp travels, and a veteran moving on slippery hemp is a fall risk.

Box rest is where hemp earns its keep

We had three weeks of box rest in January after a field injury, and this is where I would choose hemp again without hesitating. Low dust, low ammonia, and a bed that stays put when a horse is standing and shifting weight for hours. Straw would have been dustier and slippier; shavings would have been half-way across the yard by day four.

Keep an eye on the horse that eats its bedding, though. Most will not touch hemp — it is not palatable — but if yours is a straw-eater, watch the transition carefully.

Where the vet and the physio fit in

Bedding is a comfort measure, not a treatment. If a veteran is struggling to rise, that is a conversation with your vet about pain relief and about whether the joint disease has moved on, not a reason to buy a deeper bed. Ask about testing for PPID if you have not — the older horse that is slow, hairy and footy in winter is a classic picture, and bedding will not fix it. Our vet reviewed the bedding change alongside her pain relief and a physio programme of daily stretching and short in-hand walking, and the combination is what made the difference, not the hemp on its own.

If your horse is insured for a condition, check whether bedding costs form part of a claim — some policies cover supportive bedding in rehab, most do not.

When hemp is the wrong choice

It is not the answer for every old horse, and pretending otherwise does the animal no favours.

• Very weak hind limbs or a history of getting cast. A firm mat-based setup with a light hemp layer, or a different system entirely, may be safer.
• Severe incontinence. If you are stripping the whole bed daily, the cost and the labour are punishing, and cheaper absorbent options may be more sensible.
• A horse that paws obsessively at the door. Heavy wet hemp plus a pawing veteran equals a lot of wasted bedding and a lot of wheelbarrow work.
• No undercover storage. Hemp bales are dense and need to stay dry. A damp bale is a wasted bale.
• A carer with a bad back. This is a real consideration and not a soft one. Shavings are lighter; hemp is not.

The winter routine that ended up working

Morning: skip out droppings, tidy banks, check for lying-down marks. Evening: lift any wet, level the base, top up with one slice. Weekly: full lift, air the floor, reset the banks. Monthly: weigh a bale against your usage so you know what next winter actually costs.

She is still stiff in the mornings — that is the arthritis, not the bedding — but she lies down more, she gets up in one movement, and the stable smells of hemp and horse rather than ammonia. For a 24-year-old in February, that is a good result.