Leave ponies in trashed paddock with field shelter and hay or move them to new paddock with no shelter but grass?

[ponydilemma]

is one of my ponydilemmas today.

Ponies field is TRASHED - no grass left really, covered in mud, very boggy in places. But they do have a dry field shelter with bedding and we see them twice a day for water checks and hay and I am hard feeding the 22 year old as he is quite underweight.

Have the option of moving them to another small paddock - no water but by a stream so filling buckets would be ok. No field shelter either. Lots of rough grass but will probably get muddy quite quickly as they hooley around a lot.

WWYD?

I'd leave them where they are . At 22 and underweight I would think its hay and shelter it needs as there will be little goodness in the grass at this time of year , also as you said yourself they'll trash it fairly quickly . I'd save it to use when it's drier and a bit warmer later in the spring .

Thank you floralnomad. They are literally splashing in the top of the paddock it is so waterlogged :-( not too worried about the paddock itself as it gets very (too) lush in the late spring early summer so I am sure it will recover. It just looks awful and the landowner is concerned I can tell.

Could you not get some electric fencing to fence a little bit of field off around the shelter so that they are only paddling in a little part of the current field but still have the shelter?

ha. That's exactly what I have done. Except the NF keeps pulling it down, electrified or not

Mine have a lake in the bottom of their field, I'm not too worried as long as they have somewhere dry and sheltered too.

It seems a pity for you to move yours only to have the same problem in a few weeks, sounds like yours can stand in their dry shelter, if they choose not to they can't be that bothered.

I would leave them in the shelter field too. Perhaps talk to the land owner and say that you will re-seed the paddock in the spring if needed.

It's amazing how the fields come back in the spring though. We've had people here with far too many horses for the paddocks which have been reduced to lakes of mud, but they've bounced back without the need for reseeding. I can never quite believe it!