# Does your horse get marks from your slant load trailer?



## oh vair oh (Mar 27, 2012)

Lol, that happens all the time to me. If I'm going to a show I generally just throw a fly sheet or light sheet on. Luckily my last horse was black so they wouldn't show up


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## COWCHICK77 (Jun 21, 2010)

The only problem I have ever had with it is in an aluminum trailer. All the metal stock trailers I have had, no. And our last trailer was metal with dividers, but everything was padded.

A couple of winters ago hubby and I were invited to the neighbors to brand late calves and pick up a few steers of ours they gathered. We took the aluminum trailer(a Featherlite), it was the "goin' to town" trailer. I was in the process of looking for another saddle and took one on loan from a friend that happens to be a saddle builder. I thought it would be a perfect day to test it out, gathering, sorting and roping. 
At the end of the day we load the steers, shut the cut gate and load the horses in the back saddled like always. A 2hr drive home in a snow storm and I open the back gate to unload horses at the barn so hubby can go dump the steers out and I am horrified to fing big black marks all over that saddle from the door of the trailer.ooops. I decided the saddle was not a good fit for me and was going to return it.
Talk about feeling like a big dummy.....he didn't care, turns out it was his personal saddle and he was just willing to sell it to me if it worked. I offered to make it right and he laughed and said at least it looks like it got used...phew!


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## Tazmanian Devil (Oct 11, 2008)

beau159 said:


> Does this happen to everyone?
> 
> I've never used a slant load before. I always just used my parent's stock trailer.
> 
> So this might be dumb question, but I am curious about it.



Not a dumb question at all.

I have a 3-horse slant and usually load two horses in it. My horse has no issues - no marks, nothing.

My wife's horse does have an issue. Every so often he has marks like you describe, only much worse. He has actually rubbed himself raw on the divider. One of my dividers has a bend in it from where he rubbed into it.

The horse is pretty tall, so it seems he drops his back end quite a bit to meet that divider. Took us a while to figure out how the heck he was doing it. It wouldn't usually happen on long runs, mainly short trips with lots of turns. Best guess is that he sometimes has trouble finding his balance, drops the back end and pushes against the divider for support.

Our solution was to load my horse in the first stall. We then fully open the second divider (or remove it) and load the other horse. This gives the horse the second two stalls. The extra room gives him some space to find his balance and we haven't had a problem since.

If it is just light marks, a sheet might be a good solution. Worth keeping an eye on to make sure it doesn't get worse.


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## Clayton Taffy (May 24, 2011)

My horses are big so I put the horse in the first stall, the closest to the truck, and take out the first divider, so he actually has the first two stalls. Or if you haul 3 horses the last stall is bigger than the first two stalls, you could use that one. I think the first stall is the smallest, the one closest to the truck.

I did get aluminum marks untill I did the above.


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