Anyone Feeding Spillers High Fibre Cubes and Happy Hoof

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Wibbly

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Anyone feeding these products? How are you finding them? What horse have you got and what type of routine/management?

Just interested to hear positives and negatives about these feeds.
 
I feed spillers high fibre cubes to my welsh cob mare, good doer..she gets this along with hifi original and Equilibra balancer....
 
I feed happy hoof to my 16.3hh shire x cob, he basically has a high fibre diet with ad-lib hay, happy hoof, hifi lite and fast fibre. We have owned him for 3 months and he was overweight but now looks fantastic, he still has some weight to loose but we are liasing with dengie re this as found them the most helpful and not just interested in selling their own products.

He is out during day on poor grazing but with hay with no rug on and then in at night with a lightweight stable rug.

Unfortunately struggling with riding atm due to work/weather etc but come spring he'll be ridden (hacking) three to four times a week and we're also going to have him on a track system to stop him pigging too much grass.

I like happy hoof and he seems to enjoy it but then he seems to like everything!! I tend to give him a few things in the stable to keep him occupied as don't like the thought of him standing for long periods with nothing to eat and also mentally i think it's good for them to have a variety of forages to munch on, he certainly is a very chilled boy. Out of all the feeds though he loves his fast fibre the most, oh and his stable toy (decahedron) which i put a handful of herby treats in.
 
I used happy hoof some years ago for a companion horse that came to us very obese. The horses were given hard feed in the field at the time, so we needed something low calorie in her bucket.

It is also pretty good for slowing down the eating a bit, compared to straight cubes or mix.

It smells nice and seems palatable and has worked well for me even for fussy horses.

I think it is a good alternative to using chaff, basically to avoid using molassed chaff (and it seems more palatable than unmolassed chaff). It also works for having something to "hide" a balancer in.

I haven't used the high fibre cubes so cannot comment on those. However my current horse prefers mix to cubes :-)
 
Have fed both in the past.

Happy hoof is very pallatable - horses love it! I was recently converted to dengie's equivalent - Healthy hooves which they seem to look better on strangely. also I think works out slightly cheaper.

I found though that if feeding by volume rather than weight, it is cheaper to mix hi-fi lite, alfa lite and high fibre cubes, add a broad spec vit and min supp and a dollop of oil. My bags of the above have lasted about 3 months so far!!

High Fibre cubes - fed them until the last few months when I swapped to Pegassus cubes - the same difference but cost half the price. My boy loves them. Has a cup in his dinner and breakie and two cups in his decahedron which he kicks about till its empty!
 
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I'm currently using both these, as I have a very laminitis-prone pony and these feeds are Laminitis Trust approved. Happy Hoof didn't seem to have many nuts in it and he seemed a bit bored with it, so now I mix in just a few cubes. I put the same mixture in his decahedron to keep him moving at night. He is on restricted grazing and comes in overnight all year round, and has his hay weighed and soaked. I have to say he still doesn't look slender! but he does look very shiny and healthy.
 
I use Happy Hoof & Spillers High Fibre Cubes for my warmblood x welsh x TB. My mare had laminitis earlier this year and she has had this feed since March along with weighed soaked hay and restricted grazing. I must say she looks a picture of health :)
 
I feed my 29 yr old retired mare happy Hoof + fibre beet. This was recommended by my horse dentist as the mare was losing teeth & was quite 'ribby' looking. She looks great now.
 
I used to feed my old mare both of these as she like Mari's horse had to have easy to eat food and I used the high fibre cubes as a partial hay replacer when she was in. I also used to use happy hoof for my old boy who was a good doer and it was a good way of making him think he had a hard feed when the others in the yard were being fed.
 
CBFan said:
Have fed both in the past.

Happy hoof is very pallatable - horses love it!
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Largely made of Oat straw and chopped oat straw which is then coated in molasses..... if you are a sugar addicted horse what's not to like?

If you are the owner of a horse which is sensitive to sugars then maybe not so much
 
I feed hi fibre cubes with hifi and a single handful of pasture mix. The mix is pointless really and admittedly its done for my benefit as I think it adds a bit of flavour, yeah totally stupid I know. My horse can heat up on mixes so I find hi fibre cubes great.
 
Fed Spillers High Fibre cubes to my veteran Section D plus 2 new shetlands in the summer and autumn, just so they had a handful of something in a bowl to come in to. They are out overnight, in during the day all year round. Though all 3 loved them, I was a bit worried about the cubes and my veteran's teeth so I moved over to Happy Hoof after hearing good things about it. Again, the 2 shetlands and my new riding cob will eat anything but veteran Sunny doesn't seem to like it much. He's started leaving his breakfast although he will eat it if I add a mug of apple juice (to hide his 100 steroid tablets). So I won't be getting another bag of it. I'm a great believer in fibre fibre fibre for good doers. All 4 of them will be on the same feeding regime, adjusted for size, weight etc: A mix of speedibeet (don't like dry feeds), Hi Fi Lite (to add bulk), Veteran chaff (high quality oat chaff + antoxidants and mint), Baileys Lo Cal (for vits and mins) and I might get a bag of Apple Chaff for Sunny to add variety since he's struggling with poor health at the moment and needs all the help he can get. On this feed, all the horses/ponies have full tummies at all times, but a natural fibre feed so the calories don't pile on. Not sure how this would work with a poor doer though.
 
I've just switched my boy back onto happy hoof; was on alpha a oil, as he is on virtually ad lib haylage and I don't want him gaining much more condition but still need something to mix his supplements with. He loves it and slows his eating down.
 
I used to use Happy Hoof as a hay replacer for my old dentally-challenged laminitic, and I found it kept the laminitis at bay better than when she was on hay. She found the Happy Hoof softer and easier to eat than some of the more coarse hay replacers such as HiFi Lite.

I used to feed Spiller's High Fibre Cubes to a couple of previous ponies who I didn't want heated up with mixes and such like. Budget brand cubes are cheaper, and are probably fine for a lot of animals, but they usually have much higher starch/sugar levels than the Spiller's cubes, so if you are seeking to keep starch/sugar levels low then you should bear that in mind.
 
I feed my retired pony on Happy Hoof & my show jumping mare on Happy Hoof & Spillers H&P Cubes rather than the High Fibre Cubes, both look great & do very well on this diet.
 
Wibbly said:
Anyone feeding these products? How are you finding them? What horse have you got and what type of routine/management?

Just interested to hear positives and negatives about these feeds.
Click to expand...

I used to feed both but went onto alfa a lite this summer, was thinking of putting him back on happy hoof though because he doesn't get exercised for as long in the evenings as in the summer.

I used both very succesfully, I used to increase/decrease either depending on grazing, mine has lami few years back so had been on it ever since, had not problems with it, just the alfa a lite smelt so nice i tried him on it and he liked it so changed, no other reason really, bit silly I expect, but he likes it.
 
My fat shetland has a teeny tiny handful of happy hoof so that he feels he gets something when the others are fed.
When Starla was alive she was fed High fibre cubes and happy hoof together. She was a good doer, welsh x WB who lived out all year round with no rug, fed on this, and ad lib hay.
 
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