Posted: 13th January 2026 | Back to news feed
Keeping your horses healthy in their stables is one of the big challenges facing owners in the winter months, and climate change is raising the risks of infection and disease higher than ever before.
As a repository for faeces and urine, bedding has always been recognised as a potent breeding ground for disease, and for millennia good stable management has been the key to maintaining the healthiest possible conditions in the stable. Thorough and regular mucking out is a golden rule of hygiene, and most stable managers would undertake a deep clean with disinfectant at least once a year.
But using a bedding that optimises stable hygiene is also one of the most important choices you can make, and Bedmax has been building in unique hygienic benefits into our purpose-made shavings ever since we started making them 25 years ago.
Bedmax shavings: Purpose made benefit 1: Sterilisation
Traditionally, horses and ponies have been bedded on materials like straw, baled after harvest and completely unprocessed. This means that a straw bed in the stable contains all the dust, bacteria and other pathogens attached to the crop in the field, or which develop later in the warm, damp conditions of storage.
In the production process we have developed to make Bedmax and Littlemax shavings, we cut our flakes to a specific size, and then those flakes are dried at sterilising temperatures that eradicate organic contaminants like bacteria that might infect horses in their stables.
In a recent scientific analysis of our shavings before and after drying, the natural levels of bacteria detected in undried Bedmax shavings almost entirely disappeared in the drying process. Very few if any other brands of bedding are dried at similar sterilising temperatures.
Bedmax shavings: Purpose made benefit 2: Pine
The other key factor which makes Bedmax shavings uniquely hygienic is the raw material we use. Most wood shavings brands are made from spruce softwood. Bedmax and Littlemax are made predominantly from Scots Pine.
We have always chosen pine because it really does kill harmful bacterial and spores that survive in other softwoods including spruce. There is a long history of pine being used as a disinfectant in many cultures, but a scientific study carried out in Germany in 2004 confirmed categorically that only pine wood completely eradicated harmful bacterial such as E. coli and E. faecium – two of the most common harmful bacteria that throve in poor quality bedding.
When it comes to maximising stable hygiene Bedmax is made very specifically to give you the best head start in the battle to safeguard your horses’ health, hygiene and happiness – find out more HERE
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