Your horses hit each other with boards???? Oh my God that's FUNNY!!!!!(rotflmao!!!!!) I though my herd was crazy! My old mare took off with my lunge whip once! and I thought that was hilarious!

Honestly, that's all I ever used, a 6 inch piece of 2x4.

Maybe if you screwed it to the rim? Lengthwise? Like a little ladder.

Yeah, they're a barrel of laughs. I've tried small boards & also pieces of bark-covered branches - but they're all just removed & used as weapons, & someone (either me or equine) is going to get an eye or brains poked out, so I gave up on that.

Hmmm - never thought of screwing something down. Maybe I could use some sort of clamp?

We have a sump in the barn due to a wet spot. It got plugged bad one year, DS and I went out to find out what the problem was. It was smelly, too, it drained off the pigs' bays in the barn, so it had pig urine and well, other stuff in it too.
So DS starts poking round in there, comes up with a huge bloated bullfrog. Yuk. Hastily got him out, assumed that was it. But sump was still plugged. So my son got on rubber chemical gloves and stuck his hand down there. Doesn't he come up with a full grown, very angry eastern painted male turtle. Still alive and kicking.
We were laughing because of the "ahem" in the water, his shell was squeaky clean of all algae and crud.
Took him out to our pond, DS went to put him in the water, angry turtle turned around and latched onto the glove and hung there over the water!!! Eventually swam away. We wound up putting a piece of screening over the sump hole. - Ellen

Guess I live in the wrong part of the country cuz it sure looks like I am missing out on a whole lot of fun .
I have several 165 gallon steel stock tanks and the only thing I 've ever found in them is beetles or moths . I think I'll go walk around and check a few to see if any critters have shown up yet !

Breezy, if the tubs are near a fence, couldn't you wire the stick to the fence? I know how you feel about drowned critters - I keep long sticks in my water barrels to keep mice and chipmunks from drowning. I hate it when that happens - especially the chippies!

Two of the tubs (100 & 150 gallons) are up against the fenceline, so I'm thinking about that. I just need to come up with something that will keep the equine idiot brigade from detatching it & doing damage.

The muck bucket tub is up against the barn, & I think that one I will just have to completely dump & leave empty every day. I just use that paddock if I'm doing stalls & bad weather is coming & I need a place to bung a horse out quick but closeby, or if a horse is colicy & needs watching. I hate to waste the water, but hate the drowned critters more.

I keep mesquite branches in our tubs to always allow a way out for the small critters. They come because they are thirsty esp. during our hot summers. Can't blame them for that. Poor little things. My animals haven't figured out how to take it out and knock each other around yet! LOL!

I had a bad summer where I kept finding dead animals in our horses tank too. It was mainly possums and birds. I placed a bird bath in the area so the wild things had easy access to water and the problem stopped.

Flowers beat me to it. I was going to ask if there was a way to leave a low pan of water at ground level in a couple of well-chosen spots so that the horse troughs aren't so attractive? I did have a chicken fall in the toilet once, but that's a story for another day...

I laughed till it hurt picturing the horses and the boards -- luckily none of our 5 have tried that, but if I suggested it to them, I know exactly which one would be the first to take me up on it!

susan

Thanks guys. Yes, I do have a couple of bird baths & some large plant saucers about that I empty & refill (to keep mosquitoes at bay).

I think the lizards just accidentally tumble in from their usual spots scampering up & down the sides of the barn. Was really surprised to find the squirrel, as the trough was full & I would have thought it would easily have been able to clamber out.

I'll probably try to clamp in a branch or something, but like I said, it will have to be Moe/Larry/Curly proof.

Breezy, I've had a similar problem with my water garden. I stacked granite rocks on top of each other to give critters a lift out.....haven't had any floaters since. Do you think you could use a few large rocks?

Sheila

Try placeing a couple of rocks or bricks in the water tubs so the critters can get enough traction to climb out, or hot glue some wide strips of astro turf to the sides of the tub and up and over the edge for them to use.

But I'd pay CASH MONEY to see your horses chasing each other around with boards--! Sounds like you need to submit a video tape to one of the 'funniest videos' shows... :)

Velvet

Didnt know other horses do this! my mare shortly after she foaled, was having trouble making her colt stay with her, she reached down, and bit off a thistle, and whacked him with it! i was astonished, looked like what i might have done.

Unfortunately rocks won't work. These troughs are 100 & 150 gallon capacity & at least 3-foot deep. I'd need a small mountain of rocks, & then I'd be unable to tip over & clean the troughs.

To add insult to injury, I filled the 150-gallon trough on Wednesday, & checked it this morning (I usually dump & refill them every 3-4 days or as soon as they're at least half-way down so I can tip them) & it's still full to the top. So I thought that was damn strange & sure enough, there's "something" dead in the bottom. I don't know what. So I'm going to have to bucket brigade out most of the water so I can tip & scrub the darn thing.

Luckiily, there's another 100-gallon trough in the same field, so the horses didn't have to drink the "dead thing" water.

Geesh.

Have you considered cinderblocks in the tank to give traction? You can stack them several high, but you only have to lift one at a time when you need to empty the tub. Scrub them first to loosen bits and dust.

Ray

Make a "ladder" out of a 3-4 inch wide strip of hardware cloth, and BOLT it to the top of the tank. They probably won't even see it.

But DEFINITELY put a couple of boards in the tank and wait with a video camera ... I'd love to see the Stooges in action.

Breezy, the suspense is killing me... what was in the bottom of that tank???

I went out to change my ducks water bowl and found 6 dead baby opossums in it, they must have drowned and died. It was sad.

Breezy, When I had a horse, we kept a large net (like is used for fish tanks) at the barn. This won't help with drowning critters, but it helps with fishing them out. We had a horse at the barn that liked to make 'hay soup' and I spent a half hour every morning fishing hay, stray oats, and june bugs out of the trough.
I like the idea of using hardware cloth as a ladder, but the stuff will rust in a day or two if submerged.
We finally put out the the large platters that go under pots and filled them with water. Just about every sort of critter came for drinks and nothing drowned because the platters were so shallow. We used a half of a mosquito dunk in each one to keep the mosquitos from breeding.
Take care,
Carla

Use the heavy plastic version of "hardware cloth" - rustproof.

Maybe you could drape some of the bird netting, cheep from Walmart for fruit trees, down into the water,(don't know if it floats , hmmm) where horses could drink but the critters could grip and climb up on the edges of the netting around the edges of the water trough. (does that make any sense?) I bet you could even put a small stone just heavy enough to weigh the middle of the net down as to not spook the horse. Black netting may not be very noticable for them?

Watcha wanna bet her horses find the netting, pull it out and chase each other around the pasture with it, trying to trip each other. Ya know, like the Roman gladiator games without the trident??? LOL! - Ellen

It turned out to be a BIG Black Rat Snake. Well poached. Poor thing. I'm actually quite surprised because these 100-gallon Rubbermaid troughs have a sort of little ledge about 8" from the lip, plus the trough was filled all the way up to the tippy-top. Would have thought for sure that a snake would have been able to get out. Unless, of course, the "idiot brigade" was "playing" with it. . . .

That said, bucketing out dead animal water in 95-degree heat, not counting the heat index, in the blazing sun is definitely not for the faint of heart. I'm sort of thinking that rather than have convicts pick up trash along the side of the roads, they should be lent out for this sort of stuff - lol!!!

Breezy, it sounds like our horse waterer too, with the lip and all--dosent yours have a drain plug in one end? ours does, we replace it in the winter time with a heat element. course, your being in a warmer climate, yours might be different,. but ours we just remove the plug, wait a hour and scrub it out, and refill. thank goodness i havent found any slimy remains. ours sits only half in the pasture, and i have a plywood top over the side they cant reach, seems to keep the water cooler-and then too, the mosquito guard cant be reached by the horses.

Too funny! LOL.....

Yes, my Rubbermaid tubs have the plug, but I never use it. Had friends that always used the plugs on theres & eventually the plugs started to leak, so I just leave well enough alone. I just wait until the tubs are 1/3-1/2 down & then just tip them over, scrub or rinse, & refill.

In the summer I move the tubs into the shade to keep the water cooler; in the winter, I move them into the sun to keep it warmer. While we do get cold temps that do sometimes freeze the big tubs, it's rarely so thick that I can't break it up easily with a hammer, & even then as soon as the sun comes out, the ice melts quickly. I do have one of those plug heaters, but haven't needed to use it here. If we're really expecting super cold weather, I just use a couple of those large muck buckets & keep them topped up with warm water.

One year before the County Fair we bathed in a bucket some frizzle chickens. They must have liked the water so much that later that day they all three drowned in the horse waterer tank.Try explaining that to a 9 year old bringing her first poultry project to the fair!(Of course this year her pigeons were killed by racoons, and the two left are pretty poor.She's a trooper though and is going for showmanship)

I did fasten some plastic netting to my tubs, but I just went out there now to water & notice that while one tub was nearly empty (temps have been between 90 & 100 the last couple of days), the other one is still tippy-top full & there are slews of gnats circling it. While I can't see to the bottom, I can't help but feel that there is yet another poor critter down there.

Guess I'll be bucket brigading water again tomorrow. Sigh.

I am really puzzled by this, as in the 7 years we've had the horses at home this has only happened once before. And now twice in just a few weeks??

I'm no expert, but it sounds like your horses are doing this. There is no way a large black snake could get trapped in a 150 gallon tub. BIG black snake to me is 4-5 feet. If the water was 1-2 feet down, he could still pull himself out of that tank. I wonder if your horses are having fun at the other animals expense?

Hey breezy, if you have a hose running to your troughs you may want to look into just putting smaller ones in with a float valve (similar to a toilet) so that the horses would have fresh water and there wouldn't be a large target for all of the other animals. I am about to get some of the pressure fed, energy free troughs that are completely enclosed and the animal would push on a ball or on a door to get to the water. I do wonder about if any other animals could get into these troughs (they surely couldn't get back out..) but no one I have talked to thinks this is a concern.

Hang some chain in each water container. Make them the length you need for each bucket/tub.