Do ALL horses HAVE to be fed?

[Widget]

Both of mine are very good doers and are always a bit rounder than ideal even at the end of the winter. One is in light work, hacking a couple of times a week and schooling about the same, the other is in very light work due to being broken in rediculously slowly!

Both are in at night in the winter with ad lib hay/haylage and out 24/7 in summer with grass. No hard feed ever except a single handfull off chaff for a calmer to be put in.

All the other horses on the yard are fed but many are TB types who need to keep weight on. Now I realise mine may lack vitamins with no feed? But they would get fat and possibly excited on feeds.

Should I feed them anyway? And if so, what?!

[Teehee]

If you're worried just about the vitamins, can you give them access to a mineral block?

[Fizz]

add a vitamin & mineral supplement to the hand of chaff & then you don't have to worry:)

[Widget]

They have the red mineral blocks in their stables. Just wondering if they are missing out.

[Afellpony]

Falcon's a very good doer. At the moment, he has hay at night and during the day and one small feed of Ride and Relax every morning.

[puzzles]

either a mineral block (e.g. one of the Dengie two) or a vitramin and mineral supplement/feed balancer needs to be aded to your horses' diet.
quality examples of supplements include Global Herbs Globalvite and Dengie Optinum, and of balancers; Blue Chip Original or lami-Light, Baileyas Lo-Cal or Topspec Balancer.
balancers are usually fed at 100g/100kg bodyweight, and vitamin and mineral supplements 10g/100kg bodyweight.
these can be mixed in the daily feed with a handful or so of chaff.

good luck!

[martini55]

Martini is a good doer and lives off hardly anything. She is on restricted grazing and as she is in at night during the winter, she gets restricted hay. She gets a token feed of hi-fi lite for all her supplements in and that's it :)

[Shadowlark]

Depends who you ask :)

My horses and my boarders horses are all but one on normal grazing with no supplementation beyond a mineral block and in the summer when in heavy work - loose salts free choice. They never "have" to have anything and most horses know what they need and will seek it out. The "one" is 31 and gets beet pulp to keep his weight up and nothing else.

Horse feed and supplements are big business and are pushed and sold at every oportunity. As consumers we want to do the very best for our horses.. so we spring for it with barely a nudge.

The only person who can really answer if your horse NEEDS supplements is your vet and with that only thru bloods to see if your horse is lacking in something.

[appaloosahoney]

How about trying Simple Systems. Its just pure lucerne fed with beet, non heating and awesome in its results. You can feed it with one of their supplements (perhaps you just want to feed the supplements) which have all the right mins etc. This way you would continue with your natural approach but ensure they have all the necessary vits. I'm definately no expert but when I fed their eclipse supplement to my very laminitic and ancient shetland who really needs nothing extra the results were quite astonishing. If you google them the site comes up and they offer a really quick response to any queries.

Cheers - Kim

[CurlyWurlyRach]

i feed FeelGood 30 everyday vitamin and mineral supplement and i LOVE it! have reccomended it to quite a few people now. it contains biotin (which the NAF and many others dont which is exellent for hoof growth), my horses feet got visibly worse when i used the NAF one for a month and abit.

Its just under £9 aswell and lasts a month for my 16.2hh. (more for a pony less for a big horse).

she will get a scoop of alfa A with this in in summer aswell as her moody mare powder. she keeps weight on really well and usually has bags of energy :rolleyes:

[mogadoga]

Id just stick to a lick...cheaper in the long run if you dont need anything else!

Alex NEEDS a pro biotic, and i choose to give him glucosamine & msm from equine america, so to feed this i need a chaff. So he gets a hand full of hi fi. Im paying for extra just to give him his pro biotic. He has one of those rockies licks, and sometimes uses it sometimes doesnt, and if thats all i needed to give him, that is all i would give!

Like Shadowlark said, the feed industry is huge, and all us wanting to do our best will get allsorts for our horses, when in fact they dont even need half of it! xx

[Bebe]

The only person who can really answer if your horse NEEDS supplements is your vet and with that only thru bloods to see if your horse is lacking in something.


Not quite true, you can be short on vits & mins via your daily intake long, long before it shows in blood results, same goes for horses. Hair analysis is actually the best way to know what's lacking as it gives feedback over a period of time vs that exact moment when the blood was drawn. The body is very efficient and will leach nutrients out of tissue & bone if necessary so you can be deficient in terms of daily intake but bloods won't show anything until the situation is pretty dire.

Mineral licks aren't really a reliable source for equines as there's no way of knowing if they're taking in enough each day or even if they're taking too much. I know a lot of horses won't bother with them unless they're molassed anyway.

I do agree about supplements being big business, and as a result I'm a bit of a sceptic and am not easy to please! I do enough research to know when one product has been repackaged as something else with a correpsonding grander name and price tag but I also know enough to realise that the average horse on modern grazing doesn't have access to the variety of grasses, herbs and other plants/trees that they would have done prior to modern farming techniques. Horses on restricted grazing/feed are almost always going to be deficient in some nutrients simply because of how little they get.

My mare's feed is very simple. I give a low calorie balancer (Baileys Lo-Cal), CalMag (anecdotal results point to a soil deficiency in my area, backed up by what's known about UK soil in general) and a joint supplement (because of past injuries she's more likely to become arthritic). In the summer this is all she gets, dampening the balancer pellets makes the powdered supplements stick nicely, plus grazing. In winter I add a small amount of unmolassed sugarbeet and ad-lib hay & straw.

[Jessey]

Given how intensively most horse pastures are grazed here many horses are lacking in some nutrients, but if you have a good doer then feeding (as in hard feed such as mixes and cubes) could cause you a whole host of other problems so probably isn't the best plan.

Personally I like the Rockies blocks, my horses are very good at seeking out the minerals blocks if they are lacking - I say this because they rarely bother with them in winter when they are being fed, but in summer when I cut out hard feed they begin using them, when worked very hard their usage can increase for a day or two. A couple of years ago they didn't have a block, and my horses and YO's started eating soil - put a block into each field and they ate that instead (lots in the first week then far less) and they totally stopped eating soil. Horses in the wild have also been proven to seek out certain plants which are higher/lower in certain things depending on what they need.

Having your grass, hay and haylage analised (many feed companies will do this for you for a small fee) will give you a good idea in what things they could be lacking and if any serious supplementation needs to be going on - in which case you could then just add a balancer or a powdered supplement to that handful of chaff or you could get the treat like vit & mineral supplements :D

[Widget]

Thanks for all the replies!

Its a bit late in the year to analyse the hay as we are nearly on grass and will have a whole new batch for this winter, but it is something I will look at doing when the time comes.

One of mine almost never touches the licks, the other does fairly regularly so I like to provide them. I think I will look into a general vit & min suppliment to be sure they are getting what they need but wont bother with a feed as im sure they will pop! One goes on loan this weekend so her diet will be up to her new carer, but I will try Jasmine on something and see how we go.

They both appear to be fine and healthy but its one of those things you cant really see!

[puzzles]

horses tend to take what they need and not over-supplement their diets, with forage, herbage and various plants to supplement their vitamin and mineral intake: in the wild, anyway.
howeverliving domesticated lifestyles they cannot do this and so need extra supplementation to make up for the nutrients they arelacking,howeverhealthy they look.
apparently.

[Wally]

If they are getting hay grown on different land to the stuff they graze on, some commercial chaff and a mineral lick, don't worry.

If they are doing well and look well.

[Widget]

The hay is grown here. Not the feilds they graze but the same farm. Does that make a difference?

[Wally]

I just means there wont be any additional nutrition in the hay to make up the difference in any lack from the grazing.

We have a severe lack of copper and cobalt in our land, so much so that we actuially give the sheep copper bullets. (sheep are so sensetive to copper it is illegal to even put a trace of it in sheep food) A neighbour of ours had a lot of his indoor lambs dropping down dead for no apparent reason. The PM discovered that because he was feeding nothing but home grown fodder and nothing bought in the lambs were lacking in teo major minerals. All he had to do was add a mineral block and no more died.