You have all my sympathy! I used to have a WelshxTB mare who we had to be very careful with. Alfalfa was one of the very few things that she could tolerate but finding that out was a nightmare! Over the years we have found that just about anything with more than one ingredient can upset at least one horse and is to be avoided.
Nowadays we only feed single ingredients and monitor any behaviour changes carefully, so that single ingredients can be identifed and removed if they cause any problems. Alfalfa has certainly caused problems for some horses. Did you notice any improvement when you stopped feeding SB? If not I would re-introduce it with the copra.
The single most important thing that I have learned about horses is that they are all different.
Well I don't think I did but I don't wait long enough when I'm doing my tinkering to be absolutely sure - I've had her hit an energy low before and I don't want a repeat of that so I've always replaced stuff by increasing other stuff. SB is probably my best one to reintroduce but I want to wait to see what happens with cutting the alfalfa. Hopefully she will decide to eat the copra on its own today!
You're definitely right about them all being different. Also even though I know how important diet is to her it still seems to take me a little while to cotton on to stuff, even after nearly a year of managing this I am still learning (and making mistakes!)
