Slowing a fast eating horse down - How do you do it?

tandp

tandp

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Jul 9, 2008
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I brought my girls in tonight at around 5:30pm.

I put Teasel in her stable, tacked Pacey up and rode her for about an hour.

After I had finished riding, untacked, and was just doing my last checks before I went home, I was shocked to find that Teasel had finished her whole haylage net!!!

This is a net with the small holes, and wait for it...i put it inside a second haylage net to try and slow her down!

So if she finishes her net within 1-2 hours of being given it, surely she goes without eating anything till the next morning (which, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't good for a horse).

So, does anyone have any ideas on how I can slow her down eating her haykage net at night. Giving her more haylage isn't an option at she gets grossly overweight very easily.

Any ideas are welcome :D
 
Put it into 2-3 small holed haynets and try to switch to hay if possible, that way you can feed more without the massive weight gain that haylage can cause.
 
Switch to greater volume of soaked hay would be my way of tackling it.. I understand some horses are "greedy" but I also think to munch is instinct .. A greedy horse would have a large haynet of long-soak hay in a small holed haynet..

ETA - I have a greedy Shetland (no surprise there) who can also get ridiculously fat and is a prime laminitis candidate.. He gets an Ad-Lib (pony portion) of hay at night.. He always has hay left in the morning. I did this by letting him eat as much hay as he wanted initially (soaked for a long time and poor feed value hay) .. topping up his haynet each night by 1lb if he had eaten every last scrap (usually within 2-3 hrs) until he had a little left in his net in the morning.. then he seemed to have eaten his fill.. I started reducing the quantity and now he gets "ad-lib" hay and always has a 1/4 of the original haynet left in the morning.. and he is loosing weight nicely.. (on poor grazing with only hay and Speedibeet at night).. it's a bizarre thing but this approach has worked with a few other horses..
 
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Yes, good idea about switching to hay. I had considered that but wondered if there was a way around the haylage problem to save buying different stuff to the rest of our horses. But if hay is needed, hay is found!

I will try hanging up a couple more nets (people will think I'm crazy!) and see if this helps first.

In response to S_F_S, she gets half a slice of the big square haylage bales a night. They're thicker than normal slices on our current bales too, they're massive!
 
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BIrish said:
ETA - I have a greedy Shetland (no surprise there) who can also get ridiculously fat and is a prime laminitis candidate.. He gets an Ad-Lib (pony portion) of hay at night.. He always has hay left in the morning. I did this by letting him eat as much hay as he wanted initially (soaked for a long time and poor feed value hay) .. topping up his haynet each night by 1lb if he had eaten every last scrap (usually within 2-3 hrs) until he had a little left in his net in the morning.. then he seemed to have eaten his fill.. I started reducing the quantity and now he gets "ad-lib" hay and always has a 1/4 of the original haynet left in the morning.. and he is loosing weight nicely.. (on poor grazing with only hay and Speedibeet at night).. it's a bizarre thing but this approach has worked with a few other horses..
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That's really interesting BIrish!!!

I will have to look into that, it sounds like an interesting experiment, admittedly one I would approach with scepticism as she eats so much so freely for so long that if it worked I would have to call you up and take you out for a celebratory drink!!!

But definitely it has got my mind whirring!
 
That's interesting BIrish - it's more or less what we did with our cob mare when we first got her too.

She used to get enough soaked hay so that there was always some left. Once we had convinced her that she was always going to have food, she started regulating her own intake and seemed not to feel the need to eat everything in sight. Initially it was as if she was afraid each meal was going to be her last and she had to eat it all in case there was to be no more.

This carried over into the field too and we noticed that she'd often take a break from grazing, whereas initially she'd had her head down all the time :)
 
Ansiosa said:
That's interesting BIrish - it's more or less what we did with our cob mare when we first got her too.

She used to get enough soaked hay so that there was always some left. Once we had convinced her that she was always going to have food, she started regulating her own intake and seemed not to feel the need to eat everything in sight. Initially it was as if she was afraid each meal was going to be her last and she had to eat it all in case there was to be no more.

This carried over into the field too and we noticed that she'd often take a break from grazing, whereas initially she'd had her head down all the time :)
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Its interesting. I bet she'd put a truck load of weight on first though!
 
I use three slices of soaked hay, each slice in a different net. Three small hole nets inside each other, so 9 nets. Hung low so he has to chase it round in three different places. Large stones in the dengie bucket too.
 
I mix hay (soaked if necessary to reduce feed value) and clean barley or oat straw 50:50. One of the ponies picks out the hay carefully and eats only a little of the straw - but it's there if he wants it, and picking out the hay takes him ages - and the other munches merrily on a mixture of both. it's in a many-layered tiny-holed net.
 
I would also mix with some good quality straw... most horses will pick out the tasty bits first but will still have some sort of forage left after all the hay has gone.

Feeding til they are full also seems like a good approach, my horses always had two small holed haynets PACKED and at first they used to gobble the lot, now he only has one and leaves some of that.
 
we have a horse at the barn that dose that when we feed in the moring we give 2 flakes while we clean stalls and after we are done the stalls they get 4 more flakes and one of the horses we can't give him all his hay he eats it all in a hour crazy ness but my horse loves soaked hay if he is inside he can go thougth 6 buckets of water he takes a bit of hay and dips it in his water
 
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