Excess energy and feed advice

[Ant123]

I have a 10 year old Irish Draught. I am trying to put some weight on him so I’ve upped his feed in both quantity and portion and I’ve added wheat feed midlins as I heard it is a non heAting weight gain addition. Tonight he was absolutely full of energy on the lunge, which is totally unlike him, bucking and spooking at everything . Does anyone think this is to do with the feed? He currently has a Stubbs scoop Of thunder brooks herbal chaff, a scoop of conditioning cubes a scoop of the wheat feed, micronised linseedand oils and multi vitamins. Any advice greatly received as he his my first horse, and at 17h a bit too big too start getting spooky- he lives out 24/7 and will have ad lib hay from october

 

[PapaverFollis]

That seems like a lot of feed to me. And lots of different things. I would feed the full recommended amount of a complete feed if the horse needs to gain a bit if weight or is a poor doer. Keep it simple. Unless you have a feed plan that balances all the minerals mixing it up could be sending it all out if whack which might cause the spookiness.

I would look into complete conditioning feeds and go from there in your shoes. Healthy Tummy from Dengie is meant to be really good for weight gain and is fibre based so better for them that lots of grains. Saracens condition cubes or show improver cubes are also worth a look for weight gain. Or there's things like Pure horse feeds conditioning feed which might be similar to what you are feeding now with the chaff and linseed etc but balanced.

 

[Ant123]

Thank you so much . He was just on chaff and conditioning cubes with a multivitamin so maybe I will keep it simple and go back to that. Not sure whether the wheat feed was a good idea. It had mixed opinions

 

[PapaverFollis]

Personally I would steer clear of straight grains unless I had advice on balancing the minerals. It's so easy to keep adding and adding stuff and ending up with a large, complicated bucket! If he needs the weight on it mught be worth upping the conditioning cubes he already gets and either reducing or removing the multivitamin (assuming the conditioning cubes are a complete feed)

 

[Ant123]

Oh that’s really interesting- his conditioning cubes have a vitamin and mineral pre mix in the ingredients- is that enough to make it balanced. I was also wondering whether the linseed and the oils played a part too

 

[PapaverFollis]

The conditioning cubes will be balanced within thenselves if that makes sense. They aren't balanced against your forage specifically (the may consider average mineral contents of grass or hay though) but if you fed the full recommended ration you would be giving your horse the full recommended amounts of vits and mins balanced with each other. Everything you add to the bucket throws that out of whack. Linseed will because it is high in potassium. Oils will make vitamin E absorption harder. Etc etc. If you haven't done forage analysis for minerals it's not an exact science anyway but I lean towards keeping the bucket feed as simple as possible. Just to avoid feeding too much of anything.

I'm no expert but this is my understanding.

Feeding is best kept very simple!

 

[Ant123]

That’s really informative- thank you. So I’ve been adding multi vitamins and oils and micronised linseed in an attempt to build condition but in fact it’s probably making him a bit crazy. Thank you so much for your help.