Pony Care & Management

Creating the Right Environment for Exmoor Ponies

Our Care & Management System

At Holt Ball, the Exmoor ponies live in herds. 

The herds - big and small - have access to comfortable shelter, with fine quality, alkaline sand loafing areas, corrals and access to the pasture. 

Originating from living 'wild and free' in large moorland areas, Exmoor ponies value their space and freedom to move about at will. They especially enjoy interesting areas to explore and play in. 

This enchanting short video shows them enjoying the Mud Wallow andpond area. Mud wallows are also thoroughly enjoyed by the wild Red Deer.

Providing Different Surfaces

Providing a range of different surfaces helps to keep the ponies healthy and happy for a number of reasons. 

So for example, using fine, alkaline, top quality sea sand in the barns helps to keep the ponies feet in great shape with its gentle cleansing action and saltiness. Sand also helps to remove mud and is easy to skip out, cultivate and clean. The ponies like playing and relaxing in sand areas. 

Other surfaces include areas of aggregate, bark chips, concrete, chalk, cobbles - along with grass and paths. 


Encouraging Movement 

British native ponies ideally need plenty of exercise, as well as access to ad lib forage and grazing. Out on the moors, they migrate around a lot and graze for many hours a day. Exmoor ponies are used to digesting large amounts of coarse vegetation and moving around for hours looking for it. Putting them in restricted paddocks or long hours shut in stables, with sparse food, is not good for their metabolism or condition. 

So we enable the ponies here to migrate in and out from shelter to pasture, as they wish, providing  them with comfortable loafing areas, which encourages them to spend time off the grass. We feed the ponies forage from large tractor tyres. This helps with both social behaviour and minimises wastage.  Herd living and freedom of choice to move and rest, as they want and need to, is good for their wellbeing and fitness. 

Rugless and Natural

Wherever possible, the Exmoor ponies here live naturally, without rugs or clipping. Exmoor ponies have evolved to cope with harsh and challenging weather conditions and are extremely savvy about finding suitable shelter, from both cold and wet conditions, or flies and midges in the summer. 

Exmoor ponies grow an incredible double-layered winter coat that somehow manages to keep them mostly warm and dry underneath. Allowing their coats to grow and shed, as nature intended, is an important part of their care and management. 

There are times when some ponies appreciate a rug - particularly those that suffer from a degree of skin sensitivity to midges in the summer. When the ponies to live away from the moors, it means that they are no longer able to migrate as necessary to more breezy upland areas in the summer - and therefore have to deal with the midges and flies in lowland paddocks. 

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