Got your PM and replied.

I have seen a few conversions done and some have been pretty nice.  Is your current trailer 7' wide or 8' wide?  How much room are thinking of taking in for the LQ?  Perhaps making the shortwall and the longwall equal?  How much room would that leave in the horse compartment? 

Where I live, very few people own horse trailers, but do have stock trailers instead because they are all farmers.  I've never yet heard anyone complain that they wish they had dividers in their trailer to separate their horses.

Now, personally, here's my experience: 

Three horses my 12' stock trailer -- completely happy. 

Seven fully tacked up  horses in my neighbors stock trailer -- BLISSFULLY HAPPY to the point of not even wanting to get out when the door opened, not just once, but on every trip ever taken. 

Horses in my friends HORSE trailer with the see-through type dividers where the horses can see each other - happy. 

Horses in MY horse trailer with the solid dividers -- PANICKED to the point that on the second trip, they didn't want to load.  I removed the dividers and tossed them in the garden shed, and now my horses load just as easily as before.

So, IMO, horses are happy in a stock trailer.  If it makes your life easier to build your trailer that way, go ahead.  They will probably like it better anyway. 

We have the exact same trailer we had the wall moved back it is now a 3 horse with a 7 ft short wall can send pics if you like. How many horses do you haul?

Just a quick question for you all?

Do the horses not strain a bit more not haveing a partition to lean on ? Just a question. I have a 4H Cherokee with dividers, if I removed them I could probably get 5 in quite comfortably....our trips are all over 7 hours - what are your thoughts on that....

Hmm, leaning on the dividers, that's something I've never thought about. 

My thought is that without the dividers they have a little more wiggle room to stand in a more comfortable position.  If mine are tied in there without the dividers, when I open the door later they are not standing at the same angle as they would have been WITH the dividers, but face the front as much as room allows.  If they were NOT tied, I'm sure they would all be facing backwards instead, because when I first had just a small stock trailer and 3 horses to haul, I would leave them loose on the long hauls, and when I opened the door they would all be standing backwards up in the nose of the trailer.  I could have put a 4th horse in there, they left so much space.

So, my guess is that when they have dividers and no choice of how to position their bodies because of it, perhaps they do lean on the dividers because it's more comfortable.  Without the dividers, they might not require it at all, because they can find themselves a more comfortable position. However, adding in that 5th horses might not give them the space they need for that, so I'd say maybe try what the "experts" advise, and make regular stops on those long hauls, at least 20 minutes, and give your horses a chance to relax a bit from all the work of balancing on a moving trailer.

Hey TPenning

Thanks for that bit of advice. We make regular stops on all our trips - never go more that three hours without a decent rest - besides my daughter cant hold it in much linger - I think it is a girl thing....

I think what I must do is try the 4 horses on a short trip without the dividers 1st - then I can see how they behave.

Fortunately I have a camera in the trailer so I can monitor them while we are traveling.

have a gr8 weekend.

I had one horse that I hauled quite a bit in a 2 horse straight load with divider that got dependant on leaning on the divider and walls that when he was hauled in a stock trailer he had problems balancing without them. 

Maybe we've just been convinced that a horse trailer is supposed to have dividers through years of advertising.  After all, De Behr's (sp?) has convinced us that diamonds are rare (they aren't), and that we should spend the equivalent of a 4-6 month salary on an engagement ring.  That took years and years of advertising.

As for the 90% thing, perhaps that just depends on where you look.  What's "normal" in one area can change every 50 miles further down the road you go.  Normal where I live means a stock trailer, since most people owned their cattle before their horses.  If I go to a horse show, it's still 60/40 stock vs. horse trailer.

After having seen my horses stand backwards in a trailer every time they were loose and free to choose, I would think that if I could design a trailer, the horses would be straightload reverse.  Then again, maybe this slant load plus dividers just came around as a way to get the most horses into the shortest length of trailer for the lowest price, and we all jumped on that bandwagon to the extent that the trailer companies followed US. It'd be a poor business plan to continue building what the public wouldn't buy.

I have hauled in trailers both with and without dividers and have hauled over long distances with both.  Started out with a stock type trailer and found that if you have the trailer full, the horses stood still.  If you have it only half full, they tend to move around quite a bit more.  If you want to go riding with someone else and you put a couple of strange horses in the trailer, they may fight and kick each other like they would out in the pasture.  We were headed to the Black hills one time and were just about to Wall when it felt like the horses were moving around in the trailer (the trailer was full), stopped to check and found that 2 of the horses had somehow swapped positions even though they were tied short.  Now I haul in a trailer with partitions and find that I feel no movement from the horses.  I have found that a horse that is used to being hauled in a stock trailer will be uncomfortable for a couple of trips in a trailer with solid partitions because he cant see his buddy.  Some of the trailers now have bars on the front of the partitions so they can see each other.  I have hauled up to 24 hours with a break every 8 hours for water and exercise but wouldn't recomend it for a horse that is not used to being in the trailer for a while.