Good call. I like to overengineer things. Plus then you can point to the dowels and say "look, that's where I fixed it" and people will be impressed.

If you wanted to, you could keep the broken tread as well. Carefully remove the whole tread, clamp the pieces together, drill some 1/4" holes in perpendicular to break. Unclamp, add glue, clamp, tap in some dowels and allow to dry. Just cut/sand down the dowels and reinstall. It will never look perfect, but it will probably look better than any other attempt to replace that tread.

Good luck!

Importantly, the water must be very clear for this to work. If you just put some dirty lake water in a bottle and put it in the sun, the water will still be both unclean and full of life. Filter first, then UV treat.

I've been playing with a thermal camera and not only do I observe what you're describing, I also clearly saw my reflection in a tile wall with the thermal camera.

Horses are heavy. Injecting very tiny doses of a venom makes them mildly ill for a few days, if at all. Then they can donate a gallon of blood at a time to harvest the antibodies. If you tried to get a gallon of blood out of a person, that person would die of blood loss, even after surviving the minor snake bite easily. Bonus: the horse is now safer from snake bites.