Endurance Rider -Karen Chaton

Over 36,000 miles logged including the Tevis Cup
Endurance Rider - Karen Chaton
On a ride with the Porta-Grazer
Endurance Rider - Karen Chaton
Karen Chaton at the Tevis Cup
Endurance Rider - Karen Chaton
At home with their Porta-Grazers

Karen nows what it takes to keep her horses healthy.
Here is what she had to say about Porta-Grazer™

I love when a new product does these three things: 1) makes my life easier; 2) provides a better way to manage my horses and 3) saves money.

The Porta Grazer does all of those things! We used the porta grazers for a few weeks ahead of going on the XP this summer to get the horses used to them.

They work great at home and are really awesome to have when traveling with horses.

As the name implies, these allow your horse to graze. They encourage your horse to eat in a more natural manner grazing with their heads down and controlling how much feed your horse can consume, keeping it at a much more natural level. This is really beneficial for your horse for many reasons. Horses can only pull small amounts through the holes in the feed pans that are inserted into the outer container (barrel). Each bite is eaten as it’s pulled through, so it’s not getting thrown about and mixed in with manure, urine, sand or allowed to blow away. The restrictor pan slowly moves to the bottom of the barrel as the hay is eaten. It’s easy to remove to refill. I use additional hose pieces to attach to the rim of the barrel to keep Bo from pulling the pans out. There are no sharp or rough edges anywhere to hurt your horse, and the holes in the pans are small enough that a horse can’t get a hoof caught (this may not apply to a pony or mini, but for my horses it does). The holes I believe are 3 1/2 and my horses hooves range from 4 1/2 to 5 1/2, usually I can easily put two very large flakes of hay into each porta grazer when I fill them up. This helps save me time, no more feeding the horses small amounts of hay several times a day. Now the porta-grazer does the work by restricting how fast my horses can gobble down their hay, and allows them to graze for several hours or even overnight without running out of hay. This is much healthier for them as it enables their digestive system to work how it was designed.

Chief and Bo have both really taken to their grazers. They choose to eat out of them even if they have hay available in their stalls! As an added bonus, Bo loves playing with his grazer. He tips it over, rolls it around, tips it back up, eats out of it, repeats! The benefit of this is that it keeps Bo from getting into trouble elsewhere. He is a busy horse and will get into trouble somehow if he isn’t occupied in some manner. The porta-grazers and sturdy and durable enough to stand up to this kind of use.

This summer when we traveled across country with the horses, we used the grazers every night. We eventually came to realize that Bo’s needed to be ratchet strapped to the tire on the trailer (see photo at top from Esterbrook, WY), or else he would surely roll it out of his reach. Chief’s could be left free standing as he doesn’t have that insatiable need to be constantly playing with something like Bo does.

Whenever we put a hay bag up for Bo to eat out of he pulled all of the hay out of it and made a huge mess. The grazers really helped keep clean-up chores to a minimum and also eliminated having hay wasted.

Another nice thing about having the porta-grazers while traveling with the horses was the lids! We were able to put a plastic trash bag liner in the lids of the grazers and use them for collecting manure. Most of our camps require clean-up and this worked out very nicely. The lids are the exact perfect size and shape for doing this and made cleanup a lot easier. The lids could also be used for water; we found them more useful for clean-up and keeping up with keeping things clean from the moment we set up camp.

Now we are back home and the horses are enjoying being able to graze out of their grazers all day and night at their leisure. We can hear Bo playing with his all night long, tipping it over, rolling it about. It moves around the property nearly constantly. I don’t think I could have found anything better to keep Bo’s attention, he lives to eat so this is just perfect for him! I’ll try to get a video and add to this post later showing how the grazers work, and also showing how much Bo loves playing with his.

You can see what others have to say about Porta-Grazer here --> Testimonials