LOUISVILLE, KY--(Marketwire - February 17, 2011) - An extensive survey carried out by the world's largest equine retailer, Dover Saddlery, and equine safety equipment maker QuitKick USA reveals that the damage and injury caused by stall door pawing and stall kicking costs individual US horse owners thousands of dollars each year.

Dover Saddlery and QuitKick surveyed over 6,000 boarding facilities representing over 110,000 horses. The results show that not only are stall vices extremely commonplace, they are also dangerous, costly and go largely unchecked.

More than 55% of all facilities have horses that paw their stall doors, while 45% have horses that kick the inside walls of their stalls. Over 60% of all facilities have horses with at least one of these destructive vices.

Many owners who have horses with these habits do nothing about them -- yet over 50% have experienced costs or injury to their horses as a result of these habits going unchecked. Most common costs include farrier bills, damage to stalls and veterinary bills. In some cases these habits have resulted in euthanasia.

The survey also revealed that only 25% of owners carry insurance, most of which only covers mortality, meaning that for injuries almost all horse owners are self-insured. The financial cost of stall damage or an injured horse, regardless of the significant distress to the animal and its owner, can easily run into thousands of dollars per year.

Speaking about the survey, QuitKick veterinary consultant Dr Susan Armstrong said: "Owners or trainers of horses with habits such as stall kicking and door pawing should be aware that they are not benign behaviors and can cause severe injury to equine limbs and hooves. Although these habits and the resulting injuries are rarely studied or widely reported, owners and trainers should take the possible consequences of door kicking and pawing seriously and endeavor to prevent such behavior."

"This survey only clarifies the need for an effective product like ours," added QuitKick USA Managing Director Andrew Dewson. "Individual horse owners can save thousands of dollars a year simply by installing a QuitKick."

Getting reviews of new products into magazines isn't always easy. Well, if your name is Sony or Apple or any other multi-billion dollar brand, perhaps it is easy. However, this is the first complete review of QuitKick in the May 2010 edition of Horses Magazine, on page 13 if you have the magazine.

Needless to say we are delighted that the review is so positive - getting people to believe our product does what we say it will do is the hardest part of starting out, but clearly the reviewer agrees with us.

We hope to hear from The Horse Journal soon regarding their testing and review of QuitKick, so look out for it and we will post their thoughts as soon as we have them.

We are delighted to have heard from some satisfied QuitKick customers, and we are always looking to add new testimonials to our website. So we have added one to our front page, which you can see, and another couple to our testimonials page. Please have a look at the page - and yes, we can assure you that they are all genuine!