Forage and behaviour

I know I talk about management a lot but I cannot understate how important appropriate forage is for your horse’s wellbeing.

Some of the biggest, positive behavioural changes I see are simply from providing the horse with more appropriate forage. By appropriate forage I usually mean long stem fibre like hay, or, if you’re lucky enough and have a horse who isn’t grass sensitive, long, mature grass.

This summer so many of my clients have been battling with parched fields with grass that isn’t even a couple of cm long, this is not good for any horse’s gut regardless of their weight. There is very little gut fill which means, regardless of how many calories are being consumed, horses feel hungry. We need to supplement with hay to keep our horses healthy and happy when this is the only grazing we have access to.

I understand that many yards do not allow you put hay out in the field but we can always come up with a solution, some simple ones are:

🐴 Bring your horse in through the day/twice a day to eat hay

🐴 Rest parts of your field so it can grow a little longer and you can strip graze it

🐴 Take your horse out hand grazing on longer grass

🐴 Supplement with fibre blocks/hay replacer type feeds

I know that we think out 24/7 in summer is best but if my only choices were out with no long stem fibre or part-stabled with hay then I would choose the latter for my horse’s overall wellbeing.

Some signs that your horse may be feeling hungry are

🐴 Being grumpy towards other horses/resource guarding

🐴 Chewing wood

🐴 Waiting at the gate

🐴 Frantically pulling to grass/food when leading

🐴 Being desperate to come in from the field

🐴 Pushy behaviour

🐴 Generally tense/spooky behaviour

You’d be surprised how many spooky/stressy/pushy horses settle down once they are provided with enough fibre consistently. Even if your horse is being given hay daily, if he finishes it all in an hour, he then has another 23hrs of the day he knows he’s going without this creates stress around the food and they will likely gorge it even faster.

I know lots of horses being diagnosed with ulcers at the moment but we have absolutely got to get the management right if we want to get rid of them successfully.

We need to provide enough long stem fibre, even for our overweight horses. I am a huge advocate for trickle feeding to increase the time it takes to eat the same amount of forage and also increasing the amount of steps your horse is doing daily. Putting hay/water at opposite ends of the field, creating a track system, hand walking your horse etc. 🐴