The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Horse owners given advice on how to keep animals in tip top condition
With the bad weather fast approaching, Natalia Davis, Norvite’s animal nutrition specialist, gives horse owners her 10 tips for maintaining their horses’ condition over the winter months.
Be prepared – try to have the horse in correct condition going into winter so that you only have to maintain his or her weight rather than get extra weight on.
Do an MOT – ensure that routine maintenance (eg dental checks and worming) is up to date, and that the horse is basically healthy.
3 Actively monitor weight and condition – body condition score and weigh tape your horse fortnightly. Keep a simple log of your results to build up a bank of information.
4 Base the diet on forage – the horse is designed to eat forage and it should make up the largest part (if not all) of his diet, providing his main source of calories daily.
5 Utilise the benefits of forage – as well as helping to maintain healthy digestive function, the microbes in the hindgut that ferment the fibre he eats produce heat in the process, acting as an internal radiator.
Know how much your horse normally eats – poor doers should be fed forage ad lib so they have a constant supply that doesn’t run out. A horse’s appetite may be 2-2.5% of his bodyweight in forage per day but will vary. Weigh his hay with a spring balance (weighing any leftover too) so you know what he normally eats – a sudden change warns you of a potential problem.
Feed variety to fussy horses – in addition to hay and haylage, fibre products add variety and encourage the poor doer to eat more. Chaff, dried grass, fibre cubes, sugar beet and grass nuts all contribute to fibre intake.
8Top up calories with concentrate – there are many products on the market to provide extra calories for weight maintenance or gain.
9 Consider temperament and workload – traditional conditioning feeds are cereal based, so feed a high calorie fibre and oil based diet to horses that are excitable or anxious, or on a reduced exercise routine.
10 Supportfibre-digestingmicrobes–getthemost out of what goes in by feeding a pre- and probiotic (live yeast) supplement to enhance fibre digestion in the hindgut.