How To: Poultice a Leg

   Taking care of your horse's legs is crucial to their wellbeing and their ability to comfortably continue performing whatever job they have. After hard work outs there are a few things you can do to help keep heat and swelling at bay. If you are looking for more long lasting cooling support than cold hosing that is where poultice comes in! Poultice is a mix of natural clay and minerals that has a 24-hour cooling effect. If you are wanting to poultice your horse's legs here are the things you will need to do so: poultice, brown paper or I like to use shop towels because they are a lot easier to find in stores, rubber gloves to keep your hands clean, applying poultice with your bare hands is safe to my knowledge, it's just messy, and you will need pillow wraps and standing bandages that you use to dry wrap legs. Below are step by step instructions on how to apply poultice.

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Start by getting a decent sized glob of poultice. If I am poulticing my horse after a workout I will do at least two legs, so any excess from the first leg can just be used for leg #2.

Rub the poultice over the area of the leg you are trying to treat. The most common area is the horse's cannons, that area is where the critical tendons in a horse's leg are most vulnerable. You want to evenly apply the poultice about 1/4 of an inch thick.

This is ideally what you want your horse's legs to look like. Even application of the poultice from just under the knee to the fetlock.

Now we will need those shop towels or brown paper. The shop towels tear off in small sections which is just about the perfect size!

Yup, get that towel wet. Wring it out though so it is just damp. Wetting down the towel keeps the poultice moist and helps the cooling elements of the poultice to last longer.

Cover the poultice with the damp towel.

Ta-dah! The towel sticks nicely to the poultice.

To keep your horse from rubbing their face all over the muddy poultice you can wrap over the shop towel with regular standing wraps.
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The next morning, remove the standing wraps and you will find the poultice has fully dried and begun to crumble. That means the poultice has finished the majority of cooling your horse's legs.

Usually I just curry the dried poultice off my horse's legs. You can also wash the poultice off, but I find that creates more of a mess. And, I like to put as little water on my horse's legs as possible to keep away fungus.