Research Articles: Equine Diet and Nutrition

A horse who does little, if any work, and is overfed can be compared to a person with a desk job eating like a professional athlete in training. The result will be fat storage and increased risk of metabolic diseases. For the horse, the metabolic disease could lead to laminitis.

• • When horses are allowed to eat too much, they enter into an anabolic state of metabolism and store fat.
  • When horses burn more calories than they are fed, they are in a catabolic state and utilize fat stores.

Broodmare nutrition greatly influences the dental development of the unborn fetus. These early teeth created from connective tissue during fetal growth are the foundation for the horse’s dental health from weaning throughout life. Unlike the teeth of most mammals, horse’s teeth continuously grow from the roots. Thus in both the young and adult horse, the development of new tooth enamel and bone is dependent on the early nutrition groundwork. 

The mechanical action of chewing is the major stimulus for salivation in horses. Feeding your horse whole grains requires the horse to use the teeth as a grinder which not only helps to maintain proper dental health and reduce dental spurs, but also improves feed digestibility by stimulating salivation.

Vegetable oil may be fed to horses at the proper rates for the purpose of increasing calorie density for maintaining weight or energy levels. However, since the horse does not have a gall bladder he is unable to digest large amounts of oil in the small intestine. Oil given in excess amounts at one time causes the feed material to rapidly move through the G.I. tract resulting in loose stools and less absorption of the vitamins and minerals in the ceacum and large intestine. Under these conditions many nutrients could be adversely affected.

Horses should be fed according to work requirements and body condition. Most idle horses should be fed a limited amount of hay or pasture and do not need any grain in their daily ration. Weight gain should be monitored by sight, body condition scoring, equine scales, or a weight tape place around the horse’s girth.

Oats are highly digestible, palatable, often locally grown, and are typically less expensive than compounded all-in-one feeds. Whole oats are not as messy as sweet feeds, leaving cleaner feed buckets and minimal fly attraction. Feeding whole oats requires the horse to chew and salivate, helping maintain dental health, improve feed digestibility, and reduce the incidence of gastric ulcers.

Barn Bag^® Pleasure and Performance Horse is labeled as a minimum of 32% protein. The protein in Barn Bag^® Pleasure and Performance Horse is derived from three main sources. A main ingredient and the largest contributor of protein is soy protein concentrate, which contains 66 % protein. Methionine, Lysine, yeast culture, and to a lesser degree alfalfa also contribute to crude protein levels.

The Balancing Problem
Energy needs vary widely between individuals and must be addressed separately from other nutrient requirements. Nutrient requirements should not be fulfilled by a fixed percentage of the amount of feed the horse consumes. With compounded feeds the added nutrients (proteins, minerals, vitamins, salt, etc.) are force fed into the horse at indiscriminate amounts in order to meet the energy requirements and to maintain body weight.

Oats are highly digestible, palatable, often locally grown, and are typically less expensive than compounded all-in-one feeds. Whole oats are not as messy as sweet feeds, leaving cleaner feed buckets and minimal fly attraction. Feeding whole oats requires the horse to chew and salivate, helping maintain dental health, improve feed digestibility, and reduce the incidence of gastric ulcers.

The Native Wild Horse
Horses evolved and flourished consuming grass and grass seed as their natural balanced diet. It is not possible to duplicate and feed our domesticated horses with the same wild horse diet consisting of such a wide variety of forages. The diet that best correlates with the native wild horse diet that we can feed our domesticated horses today is hay and oats. Oats are grass seeds. However, today’s varieties of cultivated grass and oats are different from the diet of ancestral and wild horses due to modern plant breeding programs and cultivation. In addition, the horse’s daily requirement of individual nutrients has changed due to domesticated confinement and the tasks required of them. Without these changes in both the feed stuffs and the horse’s modern lifestyle it would not be necessary to provide any extra additives to the horse’s original natural diet of wild plants, grass, and grass seeds.