senior":1ly1nft9 said:
Some body is now taking my wood chips for their horses, this is a real result for me, I had 23 bin bags of the stuff this week.
I bag up all the chips of the planer for them, so its free of debris, ie screws nails etc but its very dusty is this going to be a problem for horses.
Speaking as an owner of 12 horses, I would be VERY wary of using anything dusty as bedding, as dust + horses = big vets bills in my experience. DAMHIKT
Horses are very susceptible to dust (they have big lungs!!!).
I don't use any of my chippings / dust as bedding for two reasons:-
1) It is too dusty.
2) It is mostly hardwood, and as quite a lot of hardwood is toxic to a greater or lesser degree, I prefer not to take the chance (as horses are inclined to eat their bedding sometimes).
We do bed our horses exclusively on sawdust, but we obtain it from a local fence panel manufacturer, who only works with softwood, and as the sawdust comes of big industrial type bandsaws, isn't really dust, but more like fine chippings.
As a slight aside, two of our GG's suffer from allergic reactions to pollen during the summer months, and this makes them asthmatic, so they have to be given an inhaler twice a day. It was a bit of a challenge getting them to accept it at first (!), but they are fine with it now. The only down-side is that these things are £80 a time, and they only last for approximately 4 weeks (see what I was referring to about big bills!!!)
Regards
Gary