How to Shed Out Your Horse's Winter Coat
The days are getting longer, the weather is warming up, and your horse’s thick winter coat is ready to go. As spring rolls in, so does horse shedding season, and that means one thing: hair everywhere. If you're wondering how to de-shed a horse more efficiently, we've got you covered. In this blog, we’ll walk you through our best horse shedding tips and share our favorite de-shedding tools to make this seasonal transition smoother, cleaner, and faster.
5 Steps to Help Your Horse Shed Its Winter Coat Faster
Helping your horse shed doesn’t have to be a struggle. Follow these five essential steps to remove your horse’s winter coat effectively and reveal that sleek, shiny summer coat underneath.
- Curry Comb Your Horse EVERYWHERE
- Use a Shedding Blade for Heavy Hair Removal
- Use Grooming Gloves for the Face and Legs
- Use a Hard Bristle Brush for Clean Up
- REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT
Use a traditional rubber curry comb and apply a decent amount of pressure, massaging in circular motions all over your horse’s body. This helps break up dried mud, stimulates natural oils, and loosens dead hair follicles, which is crucial during shedding season.
After currying, grab a shedding blade and go with the grain of the hair. This step removes large amounts of loose hair fast. Avoid using it on sensitive areas like the legs and face.
I then pull on my grooming gloves because they’re a great shedding tool for your horse’s legs and face. Since the legs are contoured, you can really wrap your hands around them and get areas that would typically be harder to reach with a shedding blade.
I like to finish with my hard bristle brush to brush out the loose hair. This brush helps smooth out your horse’s long hair while shedding out your horse in the process.
Consistency is key. Shedding doesn’t happen overnight, so by repeating these steps daily or several times a week, you’ll help your horse transition to their summer coat faster.
Top 10 De-Shedding Tools for Horses
Helping your horse shed is not a tidy process. To make your spring grooming routine easier and more efficient, we’ve rounded up the best tools for shedding horses:
- Schneiders Shed-N-Blade Sweat Scraper
- StripHair® Gentle Groomer™ Horse Grooming Tool
- SleekEZ Shedding Block
- Traditional Rubber Curry
- Ultra® Shedding Spray for Horses, Dogs, and Cats
- Ultra® Shedding Block
- Decker SS Reversible Spiral Curry Comb
- HandsOn® Grooming Gloves
- Oster Clipmaster Variable Speed Horse Clippers
- Wahl® Acro SE Cordless Clipper
This is one of the most common shedding tools for horses, and it’s personally my favorite to use. This is one of the best, double-sized, all-around, multi-purpose tools in your grooming bag. The serrated toothed edge works great to remove shedding hair quickly, while the smooth edge is great for removing water or sweat.
The StripHair® Gentle Groomer™ Grooming Tool is another versatile tool that removes hair, dirt, and dander while adding shine to the coat. Although it’s more expensive than most grooming tools, it’s very popular due to how quick it sheds your horse while being soft enough to use on your horse’s face and legs. Not only is it great for shedding out your horse, but people also use this tool as a massager, sweat scraper, and to bathe.
The SleekEZ shedding block features a patented blade with serrated tooth pattern designed for quick and easy hair removal. Using short, easy strokes, it’s very helpful in removing your horse’s winter coat. It works by grabbing at the tips of the hair to extract them without painful tugging. One specific reason I love having this tool during shedding season is that it’s great for getting hair off your saddle pads after you ride.
If you’re a horse lover, you’re familiar with a curry comb. These are great for everyday use, removing embedded mud, massaging skin, stimulating natural oils, and even loosening hair. Although this is not the easiest tool for shedding out your horse, with a little elbow grease, it works wonders. I use a curry comb as my first step in shedding out my horse, which we will discuss later.
This is a new product we can all agree is a must-have! Spring shedding can be the worst, but with the Ultra® Shedding Spray, you can speed up their shedding time! This amazing product targets dead hair follicles to loosen them up faster while conditioning the skin and hair of your horse to bring out a brilliant, shiny coat!
A shedding block is an inexpensive item that is a great tool for shedding out your horse. This simple block can help shed your horse’s winter coat in half the time and is the ideal solution for a horse that may be too sensitive for a traditional shedding blade. The block is made from lightweight fiberglass, and you just have to scrape is across a hard surface to restore it after dirt and hair build up. I love having this block for removing hair towards the end of the season and removing bot eggs in the summer. The block seems like it will last forever and can groom up to 10-12 horses.
This popular curry comb is a great tool for shedding out horses in the spring, but it’s not the best tool for sensitive skinned horses. The two-sided tool has stainless steel “teeth” that are designed to get out the thickest of hairs. One side is for fine, thin hair and the other side is designed for thick coarse, shedding coats. This tool will stay in your barn forever and you will use it a million times.
Grooming gloves are a great product for shedding out your horse, because they allow you to reach areas that you couldn’t normally reach with a normal curry comb. The rubber nodules on the fingers and palms of the glove are tough enough to remove caked dirt and loosen hair, but soft enough to use in sensitive areas and contoured places like your horse’s face and legs.
If you want to quickly skip through shedding season, many people opt for just body clipping their horses instead. The Oster® Variable Speed Clipmaster is perfect for detailed clipping on horses. They’re lightweight, cool running versatile clippers will get the shedding job done quickly and efficiently.
Although not as heavy duty as a true body clipper, these compact cordless clippers will help you with detailing your horse’s legs, face, and ears when clipping. These are my favorite clippers that I own due to how quite they are. They’re easy to travel with and are perfect for cleaning up your horse when needed.
With these horse shedding tools and techniques, you’ll breeze through shedding season and reveal that glossy, healthy summer coat in no time. Whether you prefer traditional curries or tech-forward clippers, consistency is what gets results.
