Horse owner Helen Gale:
Misguided advice on social media, obese horses competing and little control over turnout at livery yards are just a few reasons why it’s tough to manage our horses’ waistlines, as I explain on
Misguided advice on social media, obese horses winning in the show ring, little control over turnout arrangements and a lack of understanding about what a healthy weight really looks like. Helen Gale explains why managing equine waistlines can be tough for horse owners
HAVING OWNED HORSES for more than 40 years, I have experienced first-hand how difficult it can be to manage their weight, especially when they are kept on livery yards where you have limited control and choices.
I currently keep my three horses at a small private yard where I am the only person there, so I manage them myself, but prior to this I was on livery yards for years. Being on a livery yard has many benefits, but it also means that you are in a situation where, most of the time, you have to follow the routine of the yard with regards to turnout and grazing management. I know some yards where you have to use whatever bedding and hay they provide, and that can also be an issue.
I have a friend who has a laminitic pony and has moved yards several times because she has found it difficult to manage him the way she wants to. She’s come up against problems where she’s tried to explain that he needs a smaller paddock or she needs to be able to restrict his grazing, but it hasn’t been possible. She’s also suffered peer pressure from other yard owners when she has had to, at times, restrict the horse’s diet, and she’s had people telling her she is cruel and that she
wasn’t feeding the pony enough.
A horse that was on full livery at the same yard she is on was diagnosed with laminitis and was put down last week because it was vastly overweight. That person was in a full livery situation.
This is indicative of the issues that owners are facing, because if the livery owner doesn’t take the issue seriously, things do go wrong.
There are some fantastic livery yard owners that will bend over backwards to accommodate people and treat the horses as individuals, but equally there are some that need better educating about horses who are overweight.
It’s hard for livery yard owners to approach people and say their horses need to eat less food. A lot of it comes down to how you can communicate with people and being able to have those open-ended conversations where you feel comfortable talking about what your horse needs and vice versa.
Doing it my way
I have three Irish horses, so they are all naturally good doers. One is an Irish Draught who would happily eat all the time, and another is a Connemara who has Equine Metabolic Syndrome (EMS — insulin resistance). He isn’t overweight, but I do manage him very carefully. My third horse is my competition horse, and when I look back at pictures of him six years ago, I didn’t realise how fat he was compared to how he is now. Getting weight off him is really hard because he is constantly hungry, and he gets very grumpy when eating his food.
They are kept close to home so I can feed them little and often to alleviate boredom and keep something going through the gut. The key thing for me is limiting their grazing and ensuring they get plenty of exercise. They are worked five or six days a week for at least an hour and I don’t rug unless I really have to.
They have limited hard feed — mostly a balancer and low-calorie chaff to ensure they are getting their vitamins and minerals, and forage which I analyse for sugar content and soak if necessary.
Being able to do my horses how I want them to be done is far less stressful and it means that I’m not constantly worried about EMS and laminitis.
Then vs now
I have seen many changes in my years of horse ownership, and one of the biggest is in how we manage horses
“Social media can be dangerous. The other day an owner was proudly showing off her horse who had done well in a showing class, but it was morbidly obese”
and our perception of what a ‘healthy’ horse looks like.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have stables for our horses — they lived out all year round wearing a basic New Zealand rug, if they were rugged at all. Hard work was when a horse was ridden five or six days a week for an hour or more, and we had much more land to graze our horses so we could rotate paddocks for all-year turnout. We didn’t fertilise our grazing because we believed it made the grass too rich.
Now, we have a whole wardrobe of rugs for our horses and a propensity for over-rugging. There is the perception that if you are cold, your horse must be cold, but that isn’t necessarily the case. And there are more and more leisure horses that are over fed and well rugged but don’t do a lot of work.
The pressure on grazing has become greater too, because there is less of it. Less turn out year-round now results in horses standing in boxes, and to relieve boredom they are given big haynets and covered in warm rugs, so they aren’t moving and they’re not using energy to keep warm.
Sadly, you no longer get the horsemanship education when learning to ride, which means people are missing that key information. We manage our horses so differently, and it isn’t always appropriate to their natural requirements.
Changing perceptions
One of the other big problems we are still facing is people’s perception of what a healthy horse should look like.
I was looking on social media the other day and there was an owner who was proudly showing off her horse who had done well in a showing class, but in the photos, it looked morbidly obese. There were loads of people commenting saying how lovely it looked, which gives the owner affirmation, as does the judge who placed the horse in the class. It was a low-level show, but even so, if we continue to praise overweight horses, we will never change people’s perceptions and get across the fact that overweight horses are a ticking time bomb.
Welfare centres get countless calls about horses who are ‘underweight’ and ‘too thin’, but overweight horses on the verge of devastating and debilitating health problems are just as concerning yet rarely reported.
It is for this reason that I feel social media can be very dangerous. People can get the wrong information and advice and it can ruin the horse.
I always advise people to go to the vets or a professional who can offer proper
advice. If you have sensible, knowledgeable friends who have been through a similar experience and can offer you practical and correct advice, then talk to them, but try to get a balanced perspective from your entire healthcare team of vet, farrier and nutritionist.
I event at BE90 level and see a lot of horses at events, competing at a higher level than me, who don’t look fit enough to do the job. I’ve seen horses huffing and puffing around the cross-country and carrying too much weight. You have to question whether the owners see that as an issue.
At the end of the day, we’re killing horses with kindness and we need to rethink our actions before it’s too late.