Page 63 - December 2020

EQUINE HEALTH
Amy Gill, PhD, an equine nutritionist in Kentucky, says that if a horse is a finicky eater and losing weight, she recommends:
Checking teeth Making sure the horse has been dewormed
smaller amounts, more often. “These horses don’t seem to focus on eating. They are like a small child. If you can get them to eat a small amount several times throughout the day, they’ll eat more total food than if you try to feed a couple large meals. In that situation they eat a few mouthfuls and waste the rest.”
If you periodically keep giving the horse something fresh, he is more interested in com- ing to eat it. “If he doesn’t particularly like his concentrate meal, add something to add/mask flavor—such as little honey or molasses mixed in water, or some apple juice if that’s what he likes—to pour over the grain/concentrate. If you put the flavoring in a little water, it dis- perses more evenly throughout the ration.”
“Even with some metabolically challenged horses that shouldn’t eat a lot of sugar or car- bohydrates, a small amount (like a teaspoon of honey) will go a long way toward making their food more palatable without adding much sugar. The Stevia products that are very sweet can be mixed with a little water and poured over the food. It will mask or enhance flavor without adding sugar. This is an alternative natural sweetener, and some people try it for horses,” says Cubitt.
“There’s no research in horses to show that it’s helpful, but if it might stimulate a certain horse to eat better, it’s worth a try. Many of the anecdotal remedies can be helpful in some instances. Some may work for one horse and not another, but there’s no harm in trying. It helps to have multiple tricks in the bag. For instance, what works to encourage one child to eat his vegetables may not work for another, and horses are the same.”
One trick that may help a finicky horse is
to feed him last. “Put him at the end of the
aisle and feed all the other horses first,” says McIntosh. When he sees other horses eating, he’ll want to eat, too. Horses are social animals and somewhat competitive, so feeding the others may stimulate the fussy one.
There are ways to add calories to a ration without adding extra bulk. “Anything you can do to reduce volume of feed will help, if a horse doesn’t want to eat much. Adding concentrated calorie sources like vegetable oil is beneficial. If
a horse doesn’t like the taste of oil you might use products like Cool Calories, which is a powdered fat supplement with flavoring,” she says.
Rice bran is a good fat source and most horses like the taste of it better than oil added to their grain. Depending on the horse and how much weight he needs to gain, you can feed up to 2 or 3 pounds of rice bran per day.
Gill recommends a no-grain high-fat, high- fiber concentrate product like Triple Crown Senior, or Tribute Kalm and Easy. “It’s healthier for a horse to eat a concentrate with no grain in it. Even though grain is packed with calories, many of these horses are not functioning optimally in the hind gut. We want to keep the horse eating fiber, to stimulate hind gut function as much as possible,” says Gill.
Neither grain nor fat are natural feeds for horses, but they seem to be able to handle fat better than the sugars and starches in grain. “Fat is digested, absorbed and readily available as an energy source—and does not cause any disruption of the hindgut, like grain can do,” she explains.
“For the fussy eater, we want feeds with lots of calories, but without starch. This usually means a high-fat, high-fiber diet. I recommend supple- menting with Palm fat for horses that need extra calories. Palm fat supplies a medium-chain fatty acid that can be used by the body directly as an energy source. It goes through a different route
of absorption than other fats and is more readily available. Horses’ bodies learn to use it preferen- tially, helping to prevent the metabolism of muscle
cells for energy—which often happens in horses with low body condition,” explains Gill.
Some horses have obvious preferences and dislikes. “Maybe the horse doesn’t like a certain high-protein performance feed that’s a textured variety,” says Duren. “The feed company may have a pelleted variety the horse might like better. You can switch between a pelleted, a tex- tured feed or an extruded feed in your effort to find something the horse will eat best, as long as you are still selecting a product that meets his in- dividual nutrient requirements. You can use oats and a supplement, or many other combinations; there are lots of ways to approach the challenge of a finicky eater,” he says.
As long as you are providing adequate water and forage, you can then mix and match and find out what kind of concentrates and supple- ments (to balance the diet) work best for that particular horse—as long as you make any changes gradually in your attempt to find what he will eat and what he won’t eat.
If a horse starts refusing food, go back to the basics—grain without supplements, to see if he eats it. If he eats the grain readily, then add the supplements one at a time—the fat, the vitamins, etc.—to see what he doesn’t like. You may have to experiment with the basic grain mix. Some horses don’t like barley, for instance, and some don’t like sweet feed. You might try a rolled oat ration to see if he’ll eat that.
For any horse that’s hard to keep weight
on, make sure all the nutrient bases are covered— water, fiber, calories, protein, vitamins and minerals.
If the horse doesn’t particularly like his concentrate meal, add something to add/mask flavor— such as a little honey or molasses mixed in water to pour over the grain/concentrate.
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