The appliance of science

Straight from the horse’s mouth or old wives’ tales? Horse Deals looks at some feeding facts and fiction

Today’s owners feed their horses through the appliance of science. Specialist companies make it easy to deliver a healthy diet for all scenarios, whether an owner is bringing a top-class performance horse to peak fitness or safeguarding a pony prone to laminitis.

But mixed in with the science, you’ll still find traditional feeding lore. Some of it is not only relevant, but has a fascinating history — while other beliefs belong firmly in the category of old wives’ tales.

Independent nutritionist Clare MacLeod, who advises individual owners as well as helping companies with product development and staff training, says that if you go back to the old books of the 1800s there was more wisdom than we might realise. However, horses were kept and worked differently from their modern counterparts: they usually worked harder and had less access to forage.

“They were fed oats and lots of chaff, though the chaff was threshed from the grain so it was more digestible,” she says. One regular recommendation was to feed wilted nettles to give horses a tonic. This was also said to bring out the dapples in a grey or bay, a side-effect of promoting healthy skin and at the same time, healthy hoof growth.

“Nettles are richer in minerals than grass, but you’d have to feed quite a lot,” says Clare. “In the old days, they probably fed great armfuls of them.”

Time in the field is still a prescription for good equine health

One of the old horse copers’ favourite prescriptions for a horse who lacked appetite or for a backward youngster who needed to fill out, was “time and a bit of Dr Green” — in other words, turning out in the field. As long as the golden rule of seeking veterinary advice if necessary is followed, this can still hold true.

Nicola Tyler, nutritionist for TopSpec, brought the old adage up to date when she formulated the company’s Dr Green, a powdered feed additive designed to stimulate appetite in horses that are working hard or are stressed.

“When I was a child, my mother had a lot of horses, including point-to-pointers,” she says. “If one of the pointers went off its feed, I’d be told to pick a handful of grass and a bit of mint from the garden and give it to him.”

Based on that traditional lore, Dr Green is a grass meal base with natural mint and modern additions such as protected yeast, MOS (mannan-oligo saccharides) and Vitamin B12.

Many of the traditional rules of feeding, such as making any changes to the diet gradually, should still be adhered to. Don’t forget that this applies to hay and haylage as well as hard feed.

In the days of Black Beauty, horses had a basic diet of oats and chaff

As our understanding of nutrition increases, so it’s sometimes necessary to rethink standard feeding and management advice. Laminitis is a classic case; at one time, owners of susceptible animals were advised to starve them by turning them out on bare land, but this can be taken too literally.

Now, the accepted strategy is to monitor grass intake, aim for gradual weight loss if necessary on a high fibre diet and provide nutritional support. All horses should receive a minimum of 1% of body weight per day of forage and if you need to take a horse or pony off grass, you also need to provide hay.

“Laminitis can be triggered by physical stress and the most stressful thing you can do to a horse is starve it because the gut is so important,” says Kate. “We all have two immune systems, the systemic and the gut-based. If you’re ill, you might have a gut upset and help yourself by taking live yoghurt. In the horse, the gut-based immune system is much more important and anything you do that stresses the gut will stress the overall horse.”

Kate emphasises that while it’s important to follow what she calls a “multi-factorial approach”, including a high fibre, low calorie diet and, where appropriate, a correct exercise plan, nutritional support such as NAF’s Laminaze, with concentrated anti-oxidants, may help.

In the past couple of years, researchers in the equine veterinary world have focused on the prevalence of gastric ulcers — a problem that may always have existed, but has been identified only recently. One study says that three out of four three-day event horses may be affected, but it is also thought that one in three leisure horses may also have a problem.

At this year’s National Equine Welfare Forum, Dr Pat Harris, from the equine studies group of the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, said that even though there was controversy over when gastric ulceration became clinically significant, it was advisable to try to reduce the number and severity of ulcers. She said that although many factors may increase the risk, including exercise, nutrition is one owners can more easily influence.

Key points to remember are that, in general, horses should be fed as much fibre as possible, provided with pasture turnout and given a continuous supply of water. You should also avoid leaving them without forage for periods of more than six hours.

In many ways, the old horse keepers knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t know why it worked. Now, we know what works and why — so discard the fiction and let today’s experts give your horse the best of both worlds.