Just looking it up as a corral only found this one person asking how to, but they are actually describing an arena. When I was a camp counselor for a summer and generally did the horse units, there was one advanced unit that did an overnight ride. We rode to a place with an arena and made do with that to keep the horses overnight. It doesn’t have the watering and feeding station common to these, but plenty of room to keep nearly 3 dozen horses from running off, including the one that would untie any knot no matter how complicated.
It can’t be just a western US thing. You find them all over on Forest Service maps as a little dotted square with “corral” written next to them. They’re on USGS too. The #1 answer on the question refers to this Riding page on the wiki, but then gets the wrong answer for this or a corral. It might match another sort of corral, maybe.
A “corral” is a temporary space for keeping stock animals. They really come in two types although they are marked the same on the USFS and USGS maps. The type that’s most important to me to map is usually smaller, just a fenced box with a gate on one side. There’s usually a trough for water and a bit of wire to hold a bit of alfalfa. Sometimes there’s a spigot. (It’s a good idea to assume these are non-potable water.) The second type is for collecting herded animals, such as cows or sheep. These are usually larger and more elaborate, having a long arm of fencing that funnels the animals into the enclosure. There is often a ramp for loading the animals into a truck. This second is probably known to those who need to know it and the general public would only be looking up “what is that?”, but the first is an amenity that someone might be searching for.
Part of the answer
Turns out I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss that Riding page just because it hasn’t got “corral” in it anywhere. Down toward the bottom is a tourism=trail_riding_station, which is exactly what I was wanting. So now I can get on with tagging a few.
Someone carefully marked all the fencing on the one at Soap Creek Corral, but not the 5-8 gates. I’m not feeling enthusiastic enough to add in the gates. I marked the area and tagged it. The area seems to vanish from selectable things in iD, but I can find it in JOSM. I’m not sure this is something that comes up on this horse centered map, which is a problem with the map, if you ask me. Anyway, there’s not been enough time to be sure.
While marking off the many corrals along NM-15 in Gila National Forest, I found that TJ Corral had it’s corral marked as an area of fence that was also tagged “man_made=corral”, which is not an option that appears in the Key:man_made wiki page. Another person who knows my pain and made up a tag in desperation! (Well, man_made can take any value after all.) I do think the “trail riding station” is more specific in a useful way, though. There’s a little over 300 of these corrals vs. nearly 1300 trail riding stations. (Since it looks like most of those are this person, they were probably feeling this pain a bit more.)
Still questioning
That still leaves the other sort of corral, the sort that animals are herded into, but still “temporary accomodation” in the words of the Riding wiki page, to label. Suggestions on that arena described as a corral were: landuse=animal_keeping, animal_keeping=horse, animal_keeping:type=paddock. Whatever a paddock is. Apparently there’s a difference of opinion between the English speakers and the German writing the wiki page. I’ve encountered the word, but not entirely sure what it means. Something horse-y, a place to keep. It probably doesn’t apply anyway.
Tried something like that at the sheep corral on Lizard Head Pass. Pretty sure it’s not correct. What would be? iD suggests landuse=animal_enclosure as an option, but there’s nothing in the wiki about this. What talk I can find about it is tagging in zoos. Here is a cow corral in Pueblo Park that I’ve made a similar attempt at. (Didn’t tag it fixme like the first.) It feels at least fairly correct except maybe the type.
Looks like this might just get called a “pen”, but seems far too general to be useful as well as not capturing the essential feature that keeping animals here is only temporary. Using that as a thread to pull, I come to “farmyard=stockyard” which “is an area used to temporarily hold livestock, generally with many fences”. This seems like it’s getting close. But this comes from “landuse=farmyard”, but there are no dwelling or other buildings. This is public land! Public Department of Agriculture, land of many uses, land. Maybe this is still closer to what I want? Nothing is certain.