Cob and good doer owners - hay

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pottamus

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Hi,

Just out of interest, if your good doer is stabled at night or during the day, how much hay do you provide for them? I know my lad gets through it too quickly and is left for periods without but if I give him any more or ad lib his weight creeps up and he is currently not in work as I will be slowly, very slowly starting him with in hand walks soon following laminitis recovery (touch wood).
My lad currently has 3 pads small baled hay in double net.
Thanks
 
Pottamus I think 3 sections is plenty overnight ( presuming they weight around 3lb each)

Mine are in during the day, out at around 3/4pm and eat around 2 sections.

Saying that they came in last night for the second time since last winter because the rain was pouring and it was sooo windy. I gave them 3 sections each.

I have one good doer and 1 who needs a bit more so he just gets more fast fibre.
 
My boy (13.2hh Fell pony) is getting about 7-8kg per 24 hrs. That's based on the idea that his ideal weight is 400kg and a diet ration is 2% BW (I know extreme diet ration is 1.5% but IMO we're not there yet). That's discounting anything he gets from the grass as the paddock he is on is very bare / poor (yey!) and since the grass started coming through, even just a little bit, he has been coming in in the afternoon to restrict his grazing to about 6 hours :( . I should maybe cut his hay slightly (or soak it) now the grass is coming through too but his workload is increasing all the time as he's just been backed and i'm weightaping him every week to check he's not expanding too much!

The 8kg usually works out at about 1 - 1.5 slices in the afternoon (2kg) and 3-4 slices overnight (6kg). I'm amazed at the variation in slice weights so have a spring balance to check. His 6kg hay pile is massive! He usually has a little left in the morning (although the 2kg in the afternoon disappears pretty quick so maybe I need to rearrange my weights!). To cap it all he is a fussy b*gger and leaves anything slightly fusty as well as not really liking a haynet and requiring it loose on the floor!
 
My good doers don't get ad lib - the trick is to space the hay or haylage out so that they get it little and often so they don't spend several hours without fibre. So if you give three sections at, say, 5pm, then the horse will wolf it down straight away and will be left without for a long time.

However, if you give the horse one section when he comes in at night and then another two sections later in the evening (even if you have to ask someone else to pop the net in for you), then this is a better system.

Another option is to soak the hay to try and get rid of some of the sugars - however you need to ensure it is soaked for at least 12 hours and in a decent volume of water for this to be efficient. Recent research has shown that soaking is not always enough to make high sugar hays safe for laminitics, so it is worth getting your hay analysed to check that the level of sugars is low - Dodson & Horrell will do this for about a tenner and I think Dengie offer an analysis service as well.
 
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Unfortunately we are not allowed hay at our yard in the winter so are on haylage and I have a 14.1 cob who currently weighs about 410kg, very good doer, and is stabled from 5pm to about 9.30am the following morning. He gets probably about 1.5-2kg in a net before he goes out in the morning and then as nothing really out there as field so churned up, he gets 4.5-5kg net at about 7pm for the evening. The small holed haynets do help slow him up eating so it does last him a while.
 
If you're worried about him being left without fr long periods I'd probably up it to four slices and soak it first to take the calories out. Soaking it makes it less tasty anyway so he probably won't eat it as fast.
 
a friend of mine puts the hay inside three haynets to make it last a lot longer.Maybe two or three tiny ones spread around (too much effort for me !!) Another suggestion is to feed the fibre pencils (soaked down), and place very large pebbles in the bucket so it takes ages to fart around them.

Tbh, what you are doing sounds good. sm x
 
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