Preparing Your Horse for Stay Away Shows

Building a Strong Foundation for Travel and Competition

When travelling to a stay away show or camp, proper nutritional and travel preparation for your horse is key to ensure they adapt smoothly to the change in environment. Ideally, the bulk of this preparation should be done at home, giving your horse the best chance to settle in and perform well once you arrive. It is also crucial to anticipate potential challenges including stress, appetite loss, and dehydration, and be prepared with strategies to address them.

Make Diet Adjustments Early

One of the most important aspects of horse show preparation, is ensuring your horse is at an optimal body fat score suited to their specific discipline. If you know that your horse is prone to dropping significant weight whilst travelling, it may be worth maintaining them at a slightly higher body fat score to account for this. Optimal body fat should ideally be achieved and maintained in the months leading up to the season or event, with only minor adjustments needed in the final weeks. Attempting significant dietary changes, such as switching to a higher-energy feed just a couple of weeks before the event, doesn't allow enough time for the horse to fully adapt and efficiently utilise the new feed for energy.

Prioritise Digestive Health

Horses have sensitive digestive tracts, with a microbiome that can easily be disrupted by sudden changes in feed, forage and routine. Understanding how to support horse digestive health when travelling is essential. To maintain consistency while travelling, it is key to bring your own feed. Bring enough to last the entire trip and if competing abroad, confirm that the feed can be legally imported into the country you are travelling to. Weight restrictions may limit your ability to travel with your own feed, in which case you should consult a nutritionist to source the most suitable alternative at your destination. 

While bringing feed from home is a common practice, the adjustment to new forage is often overlooked in horse travel preparation. If possible, it is ideal to bring your own forage to last the duration of the show. If space is limited, consider bringing a small bale to mix into the new forage, easing the transition. For those travelling internationally with packing restrictions, another option is to have the forage used at the competition sent to your home yard. This allows the horses to be transitioned onto the new forage gradually, so that they are fully adjusted and able to perform at their best once arriving at the competition.

Manage Stress and Appetite Loss

Even with these preparations, travel can still cause stress in horses, leading to issues like reduced water intake and loss of appetite. Understanding how to reduce stress and appetite loss in travelling horses is key, as reduced feed intake can increase the risk of colic and gastric ulcers. To help mitigate this, ensure your horse has built up a robust digestive tract at home, by providing constant access to forage, managing starch intake, and offering digestive support, such as probiotic. Building up immunity and antioxidant supplies through natural vitamin E supplementation is also key to support the stress of both travel and work.

Despite these efforts, some horses may lose their appetite when away from home. While the goal is to stick to their usual feeding plan, horses don’t always follow the rules. If they refuse their regular feed, a compromise is necessary. We recommend bringing a few pouches of alternative feed options that your horse would not usually eat at home, including a balancer, which can be fed by the handful when walking past the stable door, to ensure they still meet their vitamin, mineral, and protein needs. Any additional feed they consume on top of this is a bonus. Since these new feeds or balancers are offered in small amounts at a time, the risk of digestive disturbance is reduced.

Support Hydration

Dehydration is common at stay away shows due to reduced water intake, which is one of the greatest risks of early fatigue and slower recovery. Horses are very sensitive to changes in water taste, so it’s crucial to prepare them for this in advance. In the weeks leading up to competition, get them accustomed to different water sources or flavourings, including electrolyte water, and consider introducing a palatable rehydration mash, such as Re-Covery Mash®. This will make the change less of a shock when they encounter different water at the competition.