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 I was wondering what other horse people use for icy horse pens. Is it safe to use salt that you can buy at Rona or home depot? It all depends on how lucky I get with winter, but 95% of the time, all my pens end up with 3/4 of a sheet of ice on them. even my pasture (hayfields) are all iced up (yay the north). Anyway I have weanling who is very spunky and loves to run and I don't want him to get hurt this winter if he slips. and to make everyone else comfy in their pens too, I was wondering if salt, ice melter can be used in the pens and won't harm my horses? They receive their hay in feeders and grain in buckets, so no need to feed of the ground. 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as last year wasn't pretty for my pregnant mare.

 No, commercials ice removers often have very toxic chemicals in them, like sodium cyanide.  Not only could this be dangerous for your horses, but as it melts, these chemicals are carried to streams, where it kills wildlife.  You can use sand to help melt ice.  If the horses are shod, putting borium on their shoes will help with traction. 

We've put pea gravel in the horse's pens, it give's them better traction.

Sand doesn't look nice, but it works very well for traction, plus you can actually see it if you need to be walking a horse over a patch of ice.

 I use sand as well, I had a friend who used "pet safe" ice melt on her driveway and pathways and one of her horses that had to walk down a salted pathway had so many hoof problems for the winter and the rest of the year.  The vet and farrier both said it was due to the ice melt (I don't remember what it actually was, it was about 2 years ago).

The other thing that I've done is shoveled or snow blowed (watch out for frozen horse poop) pathways so that my horses have spots they can travel with less problems, I've found it very helpful when the snow on top is crusty and can cut up your horses' legs when they walk through it.