A Dry Lot as a Management Tool for Ponies
I grew up in the temperate part of Oregon, so I had early experience in my life with gray skies and damp ground conditions. I didn’t start to raise pastured livestock, though, until I lived in the dry high country of Colorado where rocky ground and powdery snow were common conditions. The contrast in environments I’ve lived in helps me understand that management strategies vary, by necessity, from place to place. My first visit to Indiana and Ohio showed me again that management does vary depending on where you are.
I bought my first pony more than two decades ago, and I was fortunate to have a pony mentor to help me learn how to manage my new hooved friend in my Colorado environs. My grass was seasonal, and when it was green, it was rich. Hay was an important food stuff for many months of the year. My mentor showed me that dry lots were a crucial part of managing ponies where we lived. That continues to be the case even today where I am in South Dakota.
Dry lots have several advantages in managing ponies. Ponies are such easy keepers that they often can’t handle living full time on pasture with its ready access to food. At the same time, regular movement is crucial to ponies’ mental and physical health. And it is rare that a human partner can provide that sort of movement through work as British native breeds traditionally had. We just don’t have lifestyles that allow us to use our ponies day in, day out, all year round. Dry lots – large bare paddocks – allow ponies to wander about but not have constant access to grazing. (The track system advocated by Jaime Jackson and others has similar advantages.) Dry lots also allow ponies to be kept in herds where important social interactions can occur.
On my visit to the Midwest, I saw how several ponies that I bred were housed in that environment of deep soil and humid weather. The ponies were kept for most of the day in stalls. Their owners had learned that this was the best way to manage their easy keepers and still have them in their lives.
When I was more naive I might have been horrified that the ponies spend so much time in their stalls. Why were they not on dry lots where they could move about and reap the benefits that movement and intimate interaction with other equines provide? Then I saw a ‘dry lot’ and it was anything but dry; more like a mud lot this time of year! In some places, I suspect the only way you can have a dry lot there like I am used to here is to pave it, which of course has consequences that aren’t ideal for equines either. Instead the ponies I saw were given daily access for several hours to a covered arena with equine-appropriate footing where they could run around, often with equine companions.
Once when I advocated a dry lot as a management tool to another pony acquaintance, she was horrified by my stance. She had had a pony once in a dry lot that had grown weeds, and the pony had been poisoned by one of them. Obviously a dry lot in one part of the country may be a good management tool for ponies, but it isn’t necessarily a good tool somewhere else. Other strategies are needed to deal with the mental and physical health of easy keepers.
I am grateful for having the opportunity to visit the Midwest and see how some ponies are kept there. I visited in winter, and I suspect that management strategies vary around the year (and certainly by location and owner). I am thankful for the owners of my ponies who have put so much thought into finding situations where their ponies can be healthy and content and still be part of their lives. They are blessings in my life, just as are the ponies in their care.
© Jenifer Morrissey, 2020
More stories like this one about the practicalities of owning ponies can be found in my book The Partnered Pony, available internationally by clicking here or on the book cover.