Owner Floored by ComfortStall Flooring
Kim Miller - Equine Writer
29th January 2020
Haygain customer Carline Bronk tells us why she installed ComfortStall at her yard for retired horses and how much better she sleeps knowing her horses are too!
“I’m blown away by it!”
Carline Bronk is the kind of former TV junkie fellow horse owners can relate to. It wasn’t sitcoms that mesmerized the Chicago-area horsewoman late into the wee-hours: it was the closed-circuit TV screens monitoring the horses in her 8-stable yard.
The residents at her Silver Stack Farms are retirees. One has severe arthritis; another has a leg held together with pins. All night, Carline worried they’d lay down to rest and not be able to get up again or, worse, cast themselves trying to get up.
She has her two competitive dressage horses on livery at a nearby friend’s stable and had seen how those horses benefited from the innovative flooring. At her own yard, Carline was thrilled to see it be equally beneficial for her beloved retirees. “The way it’s constructed, the horses don’t slip or slide on it,” she explains of the reassuring scenes now transmitted by the barn camera. “The horses are so comfortable on it, and they do lay down because they know they can get up easily.”
Carline sleeps much easier since installing ComfortStall Sealed Orthopedic Flooring in four of her stalls last year.
The horses are sleeping much better.
The arthritic mare Ellie now emerges from her stable relatively agile, rather than “nearly tipping over out of stiffness,” Carline reports. The horse with pins in its legs is also much looser and fluid in her joints when she comes out of the stable.
The horses are sleeping much better – and more. The 18 hand Oldenburg, “Grasshopper,” who lives at the friend’s stable added extra daytime naps to his routine. Before ComfortStall, hock sores and shoe boils were an everyday reality. As a supersized steed, getting up and down from his naps on previous flooring left him with banged up from the scramble.
Not anymore. “He seems a heck of a lot happier now,” Carline explains. “He stretches out in his stable and naps so deeply that he’s scared a few people who thought he was dead!”
When the weather thaws and the show season begins, Carline plans to compete Grasshopper at Second Level dressage and is thrilled to do so without the uncomfortable and unsightly sores he used to get.
Less Labor, Costs & Worry
Cost and labor savings are another reason Carline is “blown away” by ComfortStall. The 100 bags of shavings she previously used every month for eight stables now lasts much longer, approximately 50 percent longer. Mucking out time is lower, too: typically eight minutes per stall using a broom and a shovel.
Longer stretches between maintenance visits from the chiropractor are yet another improvement Carline attributes to ComfortStall. That one doesn’t surprise her because she’s felt the benefits in her own body since she switched to a good mattress, in her case a Sleep Number bed. “ComfortStall does for my horses what my Sleep Number bed does for me. It supports you where you need to be supported. I don’t see my chiropractor as often anymore either, and I feel good.”
Since installing ComfortStall, Carline no longer watches the yard monitor in fear :
