-
-
- On another site I found a link to this page, detailing a fairly disgusting procedure for cleaning a particular part of a male horse (I dunno if there’s any female horse equivalent)… http://www.divineequines.com/kelly/sheathcleaning.html
~
The page doesn’t say if this is a regular part of maintenance, or if there are only particular times it must be done. Even so, how necessary is it? Horses had to be around a long time before anybody bothered with this kind of attention… -I would hope, anyway. - DougC
- On another site I found a link to this page, detailing a fairly disgusting procedure for cleaning a particular part of a male horse (I dunno if there’s any female horse equivalent)… http://www.divineequines.com/kelly/sheathcleaning.html
-
I don’t personally do it (I have a mare), but I guess the tricky part is to get the horse to uh…drop it. It is a hygiene thing, a clean horse is a happy horse. Wild horses also live without vet or farrier care, and sometimes bad things happen and wild horses die.
What were you searching for when you found that?
My wife does it. Apparently it doesn’t require a ummm proud moment shall we say, usually just a hose, a rag and a good sense of humor. I’m sure it varies from horse to horse, and I will give my wife credit for having a weird sixth sense about things equine, but she makes it look easy. If this chore has been neglected for a while, then it’s probably a lot harder (groan), but if you keep it up (double groan) it shouldn’t be difficult.
Horse lover and former horse-crazy “little girl who knows everything about horses”:
I would just like to say that IMO this is the dumbest thing to come down the horse care pike since aromatherapy for equines. Male horses existed happily for millions of years without having suburbanite horselovers wash their penis sheaths. This only got started within the last few years, and I’m guessing that it’s just another outgrowth of the burgeoning psychological need to “baby” our pets. No aspect of their lives, no matter how trivial or disgusting, is overlooked in our ceaseless quest to make our babies’ lives 100% perfect, whether two-legged or four-legged.
I would challenge anybody to bring me a cite that shows that male horses are in danger of real health problems if their sheaths are not washed by hand. I studied horse care in the 1960s as a horse-crazy little girl, in books, magazines, and on the front lines in various riding stables, and never heard anybody anywhere mention the need to wash a penis sheath. And before you say, “Yes, but you were a little girl, of course nobody would mention something like that to you,” I will tell you that there was plenty of disgusting personal-care type stuff that they did mention, things like the practice of wiping off a horse’s anus as part of its care routine, and washing its face and eyelids, and wiping out its nostrils. Nobody ever mentioned cleaning penis sheaths, and I really think that that’s just because it’s something the “safety first”/“leave no stone unturned” anal retentive Baby Boomer horselovers have come up with all by themselves. “Hey, what about this part? We didn’t do anything with this part yet!”
When I first saw this “idea” popping up in the horse care magazines, I was flabbergasted. It was a total “Huh?” moment. I can understand trimming hooves, but all the wiping and cleaning is IMO totally wasted. Horses don’t need to be that clean. They don’t need excess fecal matter wiped out of their anuses because horse droppings aren’t sticky like people poo–they’re loose and light and they fall right out. Also, a horse’s nasal mucus does a perfectly fine job of keeping the horse’s nose clean, as millions of years of evolution have designed it to do. Wiping a horse’s nose is merely cosmetic, and to make the horselover feel like she’s doing something useful and helpful. Ditto for wiping the “sleepies” out of a horse’s eyes. He doesn’t need to have that done.
And I have to believe that washing a penis sheath is the same thing. If there’s smegma in there, then Nature put it there for a reason, and you’re just creating work for yourself if you “get after it” with a rag and a hose. And–I’ve read numerous accounts in the magazines of “ways to make your horse stand still for this”. Well, no wonder. I mean, geez, people, it’s a delicate physical area, the most delicate physical area a male horse has. Blaze and Blackie and Sugarlump are all hard-wired by evolution not to let anybody mess with that “down there”. It’s no wonder they dance and rear when you reach under there and grab onto it with a wet rag, or shoot a hose up into it. It’s no wonder they have to be conditioned to accept it, the same way they have to be conditioned to accept injections. For two thousand years of horse ownership, ever since Xenophon, it never occurred to anybody to wash out a penis sheath, until the paranoid “let’s fiddle around with our pets” Nineties.
In other words–cite, please.
And don’t get me started on aromatherapy for horses. :mad:
Okay, but what about horse chiropractic treatment?
:: d&r
-
-
- I found the link to the site on Portal of Evil.
~
- I found the link to the site on Portal of Evil.
-
- I don’t really know anything about horses, but living in a dairy/agricultural area I have heard plenty of disgusting general farm animal facts, and I never heard of washing out a horse’s (or other animals) sheath. - DougC
I’m sorry Duck Duck Goose, you are a bit wrong. The “bean” or hardened ball of gook in scientific terms which forms in the inner groove of the urethra can be very itchy/painful and cause behavioral and training problems, not to mention edema of the sheath.
As far as the “horses existed for millions of years, etc” arguement, sheath cleaning is rarely necessary in breeding stallions, it is your average gelding whose penis is not getting any regualr activity that is the problem. Its one of those things about the way modern people keep horses – in a way that is rather unnatural when you think about it. Clip your horse, buy a blanket. Jump your horse repeatedly over tall onstacles, shoe him. Geld your horse, clean his sheath. etc.
Some people do it about every three months, many people have the vet do it once or twice a year when he comes out to pull a Coggins test (a test for Equine Infectious Anemia). Smegma production varies from horse to horse.
For an artcile by a vet (yes, a veterinarian, not a herbalist guru) and a picture of a “bean” the size of a quarter, look here:
http://www.horsecity.com/stories/090101/hea_beans_ML.shtml
Er, no, it’s actually quite natural for most male horses in the wild to not “get any” at all. Only the dominant stallion ever gets to have sex. All the other stallions have to just stand there and watch. It’s the same with all hoofed herbivores–only a few of the bucks and bulls and boars ever get lucky. All the others just accumulate beans on the ends of their penises, I guess, with no loving owners around to wash them off.
I understand about the bean. I’ve read all the magazine articles explaining about the bean. I still stand by my position that the bean is a naturally occurring state of affairs, like, frankly, a booger, and that the horse’s body will take care of it eventually, like a booger, and that failure to remove the bean will not endanger the horse’s health, the same way that failure to remove boogers from the horse’s nose will not endanger the horse’s health.
Your link, although it comes from a veterinarian, is still just his opinion. When I asked for a cite, I meant the results of some actual research that somebody, somewhere, had done, proving that male horses really do need to have the bean removed on a periodic basis. I have never seen any research like that. It’s all–all–just opinion.
And, it’s a lot of unwarranted assumptions.
Cite for the fact that it causes edema and irritation?
I’ve heard a lot of “strange noises” in my time when riding geldings, and not once has it turned out to be his “dirty” sheath. Cite for the fact that people who have heard strange noises have determined that the noises were coming from the horse’s sheath, and for how they determined this?
Cite for the fact that the bean puts pressure on the end of the urethra and makes urination uncomfortable? I submit that this is what’s called “projection”–the homo sapiens who first discovered that there was an icky wad of gooky-lookin’ stuff stuck on the end of a male horse’s penis probably thought, “That must hurt like the dickens to pee, plus it looks filthy! We’d better get that out of there right away!”
Here is an actual veterinarian who has the opinion that horses should be given “probiotics”, which seems to used to mean “helpful bacteria”.
And then it says this:
And then it goes right on to outline what kind of probiotics you should be giving your horse, and for what conditions, completely ignoring what it just said about how it’s still very problematical.
I have no idea why someone thinks horses need to ingest yogurt culture bacteria. For what possible equine food substance found on the steppes but lacking in modern horse diets is this supposed to be a substitution?
My point is that vets can jump on quack bandwagons, too.
So, I’m sorry, but just because “the vet says” the bean ought to be removed regularly doesn’t make it the Straight Dope.
None of the three geldings my wife has owned have gotten (or needed) this treatment. I suspect that it is possible that some horses might develop a problem on occasion, but I doubt that it has anything to do with being an “active” stallion. More likely, something happened to one or two horses and it suddenly became fashionable to give precautionary treatments to lots of horses.
As to the stallion vs gelding issue, I would think that the strong and steady stream of urination would do a more thorough job of flushing the urethra than a few spurts of sticky semen.
Thank you.
…I love you.
I say this with all the disgust I can muster…“UGH EW EW”. I couldn’t even get through this article…bleh ugh. I’m a nurse and I’ve seen it all, but my god I couldn’t even read through this article about cleaning horse smegma. I got to the part about reaching up there and getting the “bean” and I said to myself “Self, you are about to puke up your toenails, you better not read any further”
Stupid me for even going to that article…LOL. I could tell by the OP what I would find…<banging head against wall>
I have no horses. I know nothing about horses. I don’t even like horses that much. I just opened this thread for curiosity sake.
That said, I have only one observation: I think Duck Duck Goose protesteth too much.
Makes you wonder, eh?
[Grinny goes here.]
I’m afraid I must now post a correction.
Deb tells me that once a year they do perform this ritual.
She notes, however, that the primary purpose is to remove the grit. Most riding stables have sandy floors and some turn-outs are sandy, as well. Over the course of a year, the sheath can accumulate a certain amount of fine grit that horse folks have decided their horses will be better without. The smegma is there, of course, but her concern was more with the collected grit.
At the Equi-Sense Site they have an article on the subject that includes a mention of wild horses.
Ahh, the elusive Deb speaks!
You haven’t seen guinea pig owners clean the anal glands of their pets, apparently.
Well, only after I asked her. She noted that she has never bothered to have it done (which is why I had not heard of it–given what I do hear about, I was pretty sure I’d have known it if her horses had had the procedure done).
I have to do this to my cat every month or so. I cannot fathom there is a more disgusting odor in the world.
Ph-EW!
StuyGuy: Keep your projections to yourself, okay? Duck Duck Goose knoweth a great deal about horses, and saith that this procedure is 100% paranoid “safety first” hooey. My exasperation comes from the whole “let’s fiddle around with our pets” mindset, that 21st century pet owners “know best”, that Nature has made many mistakes, and that horses need acupuncture, and aromatherapy, and radios playing in the stalls, and strawberry-flavored hoof dressing, and acidophilus culture in the feed bucket, and, and…
Okay?
The reason why guinea pigs occasionally get their anal glands blocked and need to have them expressed manually is because in the wild they would travel goodly distances every day up and down their little runways in the tall grass, eating grass as they went, and this would keep the pipes clear, so to speak. But when you put Charlie in a little box and feed him nothing but factory pellets and carrots, he gets plugged up. I had a guinea pig, too, and just recently (not as a child, I mean) and he got actual hay to eat, on demand, and was never plugged up.
Tom, you can tell Deb for me that horses have been running on sandy dirt for 50 million years without having loving owners to clean their penises for them. I submit that that’s probably what the smegma is for in the first place, to trap any grit particles that do manage to get up in there, and move them out eventually, the way the purpose of nasal mucus and boogers is to keep the nose clean. Because the thing is, the bean DOES fall off by itself eventually. You don’t see horses walking around with 50 pound beans hanging on underneath. Nature knows best. Leave the poor beast’s willie alone, is what I say.
[[Tom, you can tell Deb for me that horses have been running on sandy dirt for 50 million years without having loving owners to clean their penises for them.]]
But how closely do modern domestic horses resemble their wild ancestors (or wild cousins)? And how many ways are their domestic lives different from living in the wild? I grew up around horses, too. I had a donkey. Other than cleaning her hooves once in awhile, there was very little maintenance necessary. My friends’ horses needed constant medical attention, nutritional supplementation, etc. We’re talking about animals that run back into burning barns, for pete’s sake. I wonder how much nature is left in them? My uncle had a horse that stepped into a roll of barbed wire and slashed itself to death, trying to get out. My donkey never would have done that.
I also acknowledge that some people live for their pets and over-tinker with them. Guys work on cars that don’t need work, too. It’s what we do.
Duck Duck Goose. I’m sure you know loads about horses. I was also your typical horse-crazy kid who read everything she could get her hands on. And I concur that not one single book I read as a child confronted the idea of sheath cleaning. However, neither did those books examine equine dentisty, modern colic surgery, navicular syndrome, EPM, ultrasound, or any of a variety of modern horse health innovation. Ever since I bought my first horse 1 year ago, it has been a process of realizing how much I don’t know.
I admit freely that I have not been able to find any research on sheath cleaning, either for or against. No research on this subject at all, in fact. You seem so emphatically against it that I wonder where you come by your opinions?
Even if your contention that horses in the wild do not need these services may be true, I don’t really see how its relevant to the modern pleasure horse. People have bred horses for height and speed, creating, in many cases, a hoof not strong enough to carry the body. We get on their backs and ask them to do quite a variety of non-natural acts on our behalf. For example, no horse in its natural state would willingly jump into water if it doesn’t know the depth. Yet, every cross-country course above the Beginner Novice level includes this test of horse & rider. All things considered it is not ridiculous to attempt to remove distractions and impediments to performance. Horses in their natural state don’t need dentisty either. We put a bit in their mouth and fuss with their diet and as a resut, some horses develop sharp and jagged edges which cause the bit to pain them. We find their resistance inconvenient, so we do something about it.
Moreover, horses in the wild do not commonly live the strong healthy lives into their 20s and 30s that modern horses do. If they founder they get eaten by coyotes. Colic=coyotes, suspensory sprain=coyotes, etc. Does this mean we should ignore these types of conditions?
I can’t believe you class something that could help a horse’s bodily health with something like aromatherapy, or music in the barn, which are intended only to improve the mental state. (Actually, IMHO, things like that CAN have an effect – on the handler. If the handler believes the horse will calm, the halndler will be calmer, thus creating a calmer horse.)