All horses need extra vitamins?

meleeka

meleeka

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I don't want to get in trouble, so can't link the post directly, but i'll just copy and paste the main point of something I read today.

"If your horse/pony is only eating grass and hay/haylage (however good quality your hay may be, and however much grass you may have), then THEY NEED A DAILY BALANCER or VITAMIN/MINERAL SUPPLEMENT".

"Grass never provides adequate vitamins and minerals for any horse, regardless of use or breed.
Hay/haylage never provides adequate vitamins and minerals for any horse, regardless of use or breed".

Discuss!
 
There’s grass and then there’s grass isn’t there.

A postage stamp monoculture of overgrazed and stress grass with no root depth likely won’t be supplying everything they need.

A more varied pasture, with hedges, trees, various herbs and seasonal berries and flowers etc. is probably much closer.
 
How many horses have access to truly natural food though? When I had horses roaming over an uncultivated welsh hillside with trees and bushes they had an amazing variety of foodstufft to chose from and it was fascinating to watch them pick and chose what they ate. They did a lot of tree and bush browing as well as picking various herbs and the local grasses so I am not so sure our man made pastures really offer a complete balanced diet.
 
I think there is also a difference between adequate and optimum.

I'd say most/if not all horses can get adequate nutrition (especially if at rest or light work) through hay/haylage or grass. .
My native survived living wild with no supplements, hay or feed but I will say the quality of his hooves, coat and general appearance was improved when he started receiving a more balanced diet. He improved again with professional nutrionist advice when I was needing to target a few things - but he was in more work by then so probably needing more too.

But he'd have continued to survive quite easily in the wild, so he was clearly getting adequate nutrition from what they found out there.
 
My soil is v low in copper & selenium so if i want nutritional optimum then I need to supplement. I guess in the wild they'd be traversing over more than 7 acres so it wouldn't matter.

My littlest cob's hoof growth wasn't where it needed to be for the roadwork she was doing. Add minerals and the farrier was taking off loads of hoof. If she'd been retired though it wouldn't have really mattered.

I kind of agree with the statement whilst also thinking if you're doing it properly then you need to test soil/hay/grass to understand what they're missing.
 
There’s a difference between surviving and thriving (& of course horses aren’t going to suddenly drop dead because they’re not being fed a balancer) and as a few others have said upthread the environment they evolved for is not the one the majority of people keep them in (& tbh when your “job” is to live long enough to reproduce a few times and then become predator food it doesn’t really matter if you aren’t receiving optimal levels of nutrients whereas if you’re being expected to perform to a high level in competition then yes that can make a difference)

If you’ve got enough acreage and correct land management so that the grass you’re turning out onto is truly healthy and not stressed (& also is made up of a wide variety of different grasses and other things like herbs & wildflowers), have a variety of different hedgerows to browse & a variety of different trees plus maybe a few different water sources (rainwater will have different minerals etc dissolved in it compared to tap water, puddle water and river / stream water) and your hay is also fairly diverse then you’re probably ok unless horse is in hard work. There can also be variations in what is and isn’t deficient in the soil in different areas (or even in different fields that are fairly close geographically) so obviously “wild” horses covering large distances are more likely to balance that out over time by travelling around. But where horses are on small acreage of stressed grass then yeah they’re probably going to need more than is being provided by the grazing if you’d like them to be at their optimum. Ditto horses on grass free or nearly grass free diets. (Vit E being the main concern for these)
 
If you blood test your horse you may find they're low in something. I'd say generally nothing that would cause an issue but IF you're a top level competitor it could make a difference.

Same for humans. You're probably low in a few things. It probably won't matter much..

I do give half a dose of a decent balancer to my horses, and when I had a sick one I did bloods and analysed hay and grass and got a bespoke supplement made up (which did bugger all to the bloods).

Got to admit I laugh at the woman on my yard who is obsessed with nutrition, horse gets tested and everything is very carefully balanced and she tries to lecture the rest of us on why we are bad owners - while her 2 kids sit in the car with monster munch and coke.
 
Most people don't get optimal levels of vits and mins from their diet and could use a supplement. Most people won't ever feel the deficiencies, some will. Some people have access to better diets than others.

The government fortify bread, cereals etc so we are all getting our balancers!!
 
How many of us have balanced diets? I do feed Vits and mins to my boy but cheap basic ones as don’t believe all the hype from food companies.
 
Boulty said:
There’s a difference between surviving and thriving (& of course horses aren’t going to suddenly drop dead because they’re not being fed a balancer) and as a few others have said upthread the environment they evolved for is not the one the majority of people keep them in (& tbh when your “job” is to live long enough to reproduce a few times and then become predator food it doesn’t really matter if you aren’t receiving optimal levels of nutrients whereas if you’re being expected to perform to a high level in competition then yes that can make a difference)

If you’ve got enough acreage and correct land management so that the grass you’re turning out onto is truly healthy and not stressed (& also is made up of a wide variety of different grasses and other things like herbs & wildflowers), have a variety of different hedgerows to browse & a variety of different trees plus maybe a few different water sources (rainwater will have different minerals etc dissolved in it compared to tap water, puddle water and river / stream water) and your hay is also fairly diverse then you’re probably ok unless horse is in hard work. There can also be variations in what is and isn’t deficient in the soil in different areas (or even in different fields that are fairly close geographically) so obviously “wild” horses covering large distances are more likely to balance that out over time by travelling around. But where horses are on small acreage of stressed grass then yeah they’re probably going to need more than is being provided by the grazing if you’d like them to be at their optimum. Ditto horses on grass free or nearly grass free diets. (Vit E being the main concern for these)
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This…..!!!!!
 
TheMule said:
I’d say it’s a pretty poorly designed animal if it can’t get the nutrients it needs from its natural foodstuffs.
Millions of years of evolution must have got it very wrong 🙈
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But surely as Boulty said, they don’t usually get their natural feedstuffs now?
and high achieving competition horses surely need a little extra….
 
Clodagh said:
I saw this on Fb and concluded to myself that proper old ley, that we all used to graze, surrounded by hedges probably did provide everything. Does a field of ex dairy rye grass? Probably not.
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I'm on old ley surrounded by amazing hedges - but still short in copper & selenium! Plus one of my fields showed up as low in manganese last year. I wasn't bothering to supplement until hoof growth slowed down but it speeded up when I did.
 
Jambarissa said:
If you blood test your horse you may find they're low in something. I'd say generally nothing that would cause an issue but IF you're a top level competitor it could make a difference.

Same for humans. You're probably low in a few things. It probably won't matter much..

I do give half a dose of a decent balancer to my horses, and when I had a sick one I did bloods and analysed hay and grass and got a bespoke supplement made up (which did bugger all to the bloods).

Got to admit I laugh at the woman on my yard who is obsessed with nutrition, horse gets tested and everything is very carefully balanced and she tries to lecture the rest of us on why we are bad owners - while her 2 kids sit in the car with monster munch and coke.
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I disagree with probably low in a few things but it won’t matter much.
I had a blood test that showed I was low but still in the ‘normal range’ for vitamin d, folate and iron, I wasn’t advised to start taking vitamins however I chose to and it made me feel so much better.
 
Marshpiper said:
But surely as Boulty said, they don’t usually get their natural feedstuffs now?
and high achieving competition horses surely need a little extra….
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FieldOrnaments said:
Depends on the hay/grass in question and the horse itself surely
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No, the post was very specific, no grass or hay would be good enough, even for natives, presumably, including my Shetlands!
 
They probably would survive but if we are going to expect them to move like athletes we should treat them like athletes and ensuring they have a well balanced diet is part of that. All of my horses get a balancer so I can give essentially a hay/grass focused diet but I know they aren’t lacking in anything too much. They only get hard feed if they are in need of it to maintain weight (more than a token feed to carry the balancer that is)
 
meleeka said:
No, the post was very specific, no grass or hay would be good enough, even for natives, presumably, including my Shetlands!
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If, as said several times on here it was the sort of fields/pastures that we used to have, with all sorts of natural herbs, wild flowers, clover growing, cow parsley on the headlands even, then maybe…but we don’t…and I suspect the poster would accept your shetlands wouldn’t need any backup….
 
Horses have evolved to be pretty clever survival machines. They can store certain fat soluble vitamins in their liver & fatty tissues that they draw from over winter when grass is sparse and they generate B vitamins in their hind gut. For most horses with a low workload who have access to good grazing in summer months this means they can probably do fine without additional vitamins. Horses on restricted grazing or hay-only diets, track systems etc. are likely to struggle I think without complementary feed as they don’t have the opportunity to build these reserves and the nutrient levels in hay are much lower. Most balancers are also developed on the nutritional profile required by a horse in optimum work, so I’d imagine your average leisure horse, retired or companion horse doesn’t deplete vitamins and minerals at the same rate or require the same levels to dip into deficiency.

I think it would be a hard one to find a definitive answer to as I imagine much of the research into it has been conducted or sponsored by feed companies 😉

Saying that mine tend to get a balancer because they get a daily bucket feed out of routine, so if they’re good doers who don’t need a complete feed, a cup of balancer is an easy option that doesn’t feel completely pointless to feed. I don’t add balancer if I’m feeding a complete feed though and I don’t obsess about it. Fussy horse refuses his feed quite regularly and seems fat and shiny enough!
 
No one has defined what ‘balanced’ means in horses. Optimal dietary levels are purely guesswork (as they are in humans), so you can only ever try to match up to some kind of arbitrary number.
In my opinion, if your horse is eating a diet predominantly made of green stuff (in proper fields) then it will be receiving enough vitamins. Minerals are different and I do supplement for those as I know my grazing is deficient in a couple and my horses can’t wonder to other locations to find those minerals naturally. If you restrict your horse’s natural intake in any way then yes, add back in what you have taken out.
 
I think it’s an interesting phenomenon of whether things like balancers and horses having deficiencies have come about due to A) greater knowledge/research or B) changes to how we keep horses. Not so many years ago it was the norm that most horses went out onto rested pasture for most of spring/summer and likely derived much of the vitamins they needed from good grass which is very nutrient dense. We’ve moved a lot more into having less available land, over grazed fields and of course the movement towards grass-free management for some. But then you’ve also got the epidemic of metabolic issues, which years ago we didn’t see so much of so no choice but to reduce grass intake, possibly as our horses live much more sedentary lives than they traditionally would have?
 
I saw the original post on FB and it said that every horse should have a daily balancer! but how do you know what they're lacking in? a daily balance is generic and might in fact give the horse more of what they don't need! its like saying that everyone should take a multi vitamin! but unless you know what is lacking in the diet, surely a daily balancer or vitamin is almost useless
 
I feed straights then Add in what i think will improve what i want to improve, i know my horses, i start with small doses and keep at a level where i see visable improvement

Im always looking to add to the list of nutrional supplements but the the mo its about perfect, feet, weight, energy, general look, attitude especially to work, playtime in the field, how they play and carry themselves, and that lovely facial expression that says, life feels good, it all tells us something
 
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