Feeding horses. Common sense feeding practices. Learning topic: Provide advice on health and nutrition

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1 Feeding horses There are many rules and important elements of horse care and management that we should be aware of when preparing and feeding horses as well as watering them. Most of these are based on commonsense and having some knowledge of horse husbandry and care. Common sense feeding practices Try to adopt these commonsense rules every day when feeding and watering horses to ensure that all the horses you are caring for, especially those locked in stables, can maintain optimum health, appropriate body condition and tolerate their exercise regime comfortably. Some basic rules for good feeding practices could include: Feed little and feed often try to imitate feeding habits in nature. Feed according to temperament, work load and body condition. Feed sufficient fibre in the diet. Only ever feed good quality feedstuffs to all horses, regardless of their cost. Make any feed changes slowly, phase in completely new diets over days and make minor changes in feed blends over a minimum of 3-5 days. If bringing paddock horses into stables or yards, change them from pasture straight to good quality lucerne hay, and phase in hard feeds over days. These horses are more prone to diet upset because they would not contain any of the bacterial bugs, called gut flora to cope with what is in hard feeds, but they can cope with hay, because it is similar to digesting pasture, as long as the hay is not too rich. Feed a balanced individual diet to all horses. Feed enough bulk and roughage in the diet to help the digestive process and avoid problems like colic, constipation, or diarrhoea. Remember, roughage exercises and cleanses the digestive tract. Feed stabled or yarded horses something succulent every day if they do not have any paddock access make a habit of hand picking some grass each day, avoiding weeds. 1

2 Follow a routine for feed times and try to stick to it. Keep all eating and drinking containers and horse feeding utensils clean. When feeding horses, allow them uninterrupted time to eat and enjoy their food, especially young or nervous horses. The best reward you can give a horse is not only a feed, but time alone, especially horses in training. Feed horses according to the amount of exercise or work done, not the amount anticipated. To minimise waste, all feeds, including hay, should be fed in some sort of bin or hay net. Feed by weighing feeds correctly, not by volume or guestimates. Common sense watering practices Some basic rules for good watering practices could include: Do the watering before feeding to minimise dust. Scrub automatic nose bowl waterers out very regularly with a hard brush. Do not constantly top up water, change it and clean the bin regularly. Smell and feel the water regularly. If it is sweet smelling, change it. Check the water pressure on the float valves of automatic waterers regularly to ensure that water lines are not blocked. Always change the water of stabled horses on grain diets, as grain in the water will sour it. Complement feeding and watering with good husbandry, including farriery, dentistry, vaccination, worming programmes, and adopting considerate training regimes. 2

3 How the normal horse eats The horse has flat-edged incisor teeth, and very mobile lips which work together, with some assistance from their tongues, to lift feed, cut off feed like grass and to pull the food into the mouth. The tongue pushes the food back to the premolar and molar teeth, (the back teeth), which provide a grinding surface. The horse grinds it food in a sweeping motion from side to side. One of the main reasons that they chew this way is because the upper jaw is about 30% wider than the lower jaw. If they chewed their food in an up and down motion like carnivores (meat eaters do), they would not be able to it break food down small enough to swallow; plus the type of food that they eat would not break down this way. Try putting a handful of stalky hay and whole oats into your mouth and chomp them up and down and see how much they break up. Horses chew their feed fairly well before they swallow it. For instance, did you know that it takes the horse several thousand jaw sweeps to eat a kilogram of oats? Other interesting facts about the horse s feeding habits Horses are normally always hungry and willing to eat: As mentioned before, this is because the food does not stay in the actual stomach very long. They do eat all their food, constantly sifting through their bedding looking for the tiniest of morsels, and if given the opportunity in the stable, they would probably eat almost continuously. Horses produce a lot of saliva, which they swallow: They do not normally dribble and drool while eating and they do not salivate and drool like a dog at the sight or smell of food. They drop little food from their mouth while chewing, and their teeth make a distinct crunch and grind noise while chewing their food. It is normal for them to go and have a drink while eating; they often stand at the water, finish what they are chewing before having a drink and then return to their food. They don t often urinate when eating: Horses often do not defecate either until they are finished. In the paddock, they often finish their feed before drinking or eliminating wastes. If they are grazing, they often stop and go to a urine spot to urinate, but often they just defecate as they are grazing along, it depends on the horse and often on the sex of the horse. Coughing: Coughing when eating is not really normal and could indicate a problem or that the food is too dry. 3

4 Normal drinking habits in the horse Horses suck water in through their lips, with their neck low and extended. They swallow large mouthfuls at a time and easily consume many litres at each visit to the water. It is quite normal for the ears to move slightly back and forth with each swallow, and for a muscle above the eye to move in and out with each swallow. The average adult horse at rest in cool weather will drink litres of water daily. When the weather is hot or during intense exercise, the horse will easily consume four times this amount. Water is used in the horse's body to: maintain the fluid content of blood and tissues enable the body to take up nutrients and to digest lubricate the digestive tract and keep faeces at the normal consistency maintain kidney function provide fluid balance within the actual body control body temperature produce sweat for cooling during exercise or in hot weather provide cooling of the body via the lungs. Water requirements Horses have different water requirements for different reasons, including: Exercise Diet Climate Growth Urinary losses Reproduction Working horses doing moderate work may lose up to 11 litres per hour of fluid in sweat. They need to consume lots of water to make up the loss. If fed dry feed and hay, horses will need to consume more water. If pasture is dry, their water consumption will also be increased. High salt or high protein diets increase water needs. Environmental temperatures, especially hot, humid conditions, increase requirements. Requirements for growth can be up 10-15% higher than an adult horse of similar height and weight. The average 500 kg horse excretes around 17 litres of urine per day. This has many variations. Mares in season excrete 20% more urine than normal, because of straining to pass urine when displaying oestrus, therefore requirements would be increased. Mares lactating, require 50-70% more water for milk production than those that are not. 4

5 Gastrointestinal losses If horses are sick with diarrhoea, fluid losses are often substantial, these horses require lots more fluid to make up the deficit. Often they cannot consume enough water, even when forced into the horse via a nasogastric tube, they still dehydrate. These horses will die very quickly without intravenous fluid therapy. Nutrition-related problems Diet-related diseases caused by deficiencies, toxicities, or imbalances of nutrients usually occur during periods of greatest nutritional stress. This usually occurs during rapid growth of the foal or times when the equine body is most in need of proper nutrition, eg during illness, recovering from events and during times of stress. Common diseases of growing foals include nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism, developmental orthopaedic disease and contracted tendons. Nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism is caused by an imbalance of the amounts of calcium and phosphorus in the diet. Diets rich in organic phosphorus and low in calcium can cause release of the parathyroid hormone from the parathyroid gland in the neck of horses. This hormone is released to stimulate removal of calcium from the bones of the animal in an attempt to maintain normal blood levels of calcium. The calcium lost from the bone is replaced by connective tissue resulting in enlargement of the bones of the head. In fact, the disease is often called Big Head because of this abnormality. It also is sometimes called Miller s Disease, because historically it was seen commonly in the horses owned by wheat millers who fed their horses large amounts of bran. Developmental orthopaedic disease describes a variety of bone abnormalities that occasionally occur in young, rapidly growing horses (and other species). Various causes for these diseases have been reported, including environmental, genetic, and nutritional. It is likely that there is not one single cause of all cases, and many factors may interact. It has been suggested that providing excessive amounts of feed to foals to attempt to achieve rapid growth rates may promote the disease. It also has been suggested that deficiencies of trace minerals, including copper, zinc, and manganese may also play a role. Contracted flexor tendons in foals have also been associated with rapid growth rates and high planes of nutrition. Contracted tendons can occur quite rapidly in foals; a concavity can develop in the hoof wall and the heel will begin to rise within 24 hours. The name contracted tendons comes from the appearance that the flexor tendons of the foot have contracted. However, it is more likely that development of the flexor apparatus of affected foals does not develop at the same rate as the rest of the limb, which results in the pointed-toe appearance. 5