How Often Should You Muck a Horse's Stall?

If you muck your horse's stall regularly, your horse will become accustomed to dirtying the same place each time, and the job will be easier. To clean your horse's stall you will need a pitchfork and a few other tools.

  1. What is "Mucking"?

    • Mucking, when used in the horse world, means removing all solid and liquid waste from a horse's stall with the use of a shovel, pitchfork or other tools.

    How Often Should I Muck?

    • Because of health and safety concerns, a horse's stall should be mucked, at minimum, once a day. Twice a day is ideal, and three times a day is considered optimal.

    Health Effects

    • Mucking a horse's stall once a day prevents a build up of ammonia from liquid waste and prevents a horse from kicking around solid waste, creating an even bigger mess to clean up. Mucking a stall daily also allows you to that there are no underlying health problems, such as parasites in fecal matter.

    How Long Does It Take?

    • Mucking one stall can take a person up to an hour. Through practice, however, a single stall should take only 10 minutes a day to muck.

    Tips For Mucking

    • Mucking a stall is often done in the morning so that the horse does not have to suffer with the stench of its waste throughout the day. After several days, you'll notice that horses form habits, and usually eliminate in the same spots, making clean-up easier. Mares generally urinate toward the back walls and corners of a stall, while geldings urinate in the center. Stallions can, and do, urinate wherever they please, and mucking can take quite a while.