can a grass sickness horse eat too much?

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MrVelvet

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Right so after the 'my horse has grass sickness' panic, I now have a new panic! Can he eat too much and colic??? Vet says he can have as much as he likes and whatever he likes. But, he's not really turning his nose up at any hard feed - he's having grass and hay. Iv been shovelling mix and sugarbeet into him and now I'm wondering if I'm doing the right thing?? Should I keep it to a minimum or stick to bland things like sugarbeet or is acceptable to leave him with a bucket of mix?? Help :(
 
You could do little and often with the mix if you're worried. Eg some when you arrive then some more every hour until you leave, so he doesn't have a huge bucket at once. He could have sugar beet or something in between the mix so you're not leaving him with nothing
 
Also when I needed to put weight on a horse at risk of laminitis, but could only feed once a day, I fed spillers response slow release energy cubes & dengie alfa beet & blue chip balancer. I felt it was less risk of digestive upset with most of the content being fibre. I was feeding rather a large amount at once. The spillers cubes are about 19% fibre 12% protein and 11% starch I think. 11MJDE/KG Alfa beet is high calorie too.
 
What I was taught is the horses stomach takes 45min to digest hard feed and then empty, and stomach is the size of a rugby ball so can take 2 large scoops of feed at once. Any more than that and you need to split it into two (or more) feeds per day. The exception is fibre which they can have ad lib. So feeding once an hour or leaving horse with a huge bucket feed that's only fibre, is actually sticking to the feeding rules. I'm glad your horse is still eating anyway, that's a good sign. Hopefully he will recover.
 
Sorry to hear your horse had GS, i don't know if i saw your original post about it so don't know the full story, but i would be wary of feeding a lot of cereals to a horse recovering from Grass sickness. Their guts will have had quite a tough time of it lately and so i would want to be feeding a lot of fibre and protein but avoiding cereals and starch as much as possible. When my 2 year old was recovering from GS last year she was on as much chaff and sugarbeet/alpha beet (i tried keeping her on unmollassed stuff but she wasn't really eating it) as she would eat. She was getting a large trug of Badminton ultragrass and alfa a oil 2-3 times a day, out at grass unless the weather was cold or wet and a feed of Alfa A oil, sugarbeet, balancer and micronised linseed as well as Curragh Carron Oil (basically linseed oil) 2-3 times a day. She wasn't really interested in hay or haylage, preferring grass or chaff.
 
Could you feed him ad lib with a hard feed that can be fed as a hay replacer, such as soaked spillers high fibre cubes?
 
You absolutely need to get calories into a gs horse, use high calorie balances like outshine, these are fed in small amounts so won't overload the gut keep a variety of fibre available at all times and feed a high calorie mix like a stud mix (or cubes which can be per soaked) competition feeds, or something like Allen and page veteran is also really good, yes you do need to be aware of colic but mr v needs high calories, oil is great and will also protect the gut for colic x have emailed you x
 
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