Feeding 34yo fussy Welsh x Arab

[Scranny_Ann]

My old girl is getting more fussy by the day!! She's always been funny with hay/haylage quality but now it's widened to her hard feed. She's hard to keep weight on, i've had her nearly 18 years and she's always been the same. Currently fed on speedi-beet & Hi-Fi (which she loves

) and Allen & Paige Old Faithful mix which she has now decided to turn her nose up at

! Any ideas what i could try next? What do you feed your oldies

? Ideally after something well balanced in supplements/high quality (not worried about price) as supplements are also a complete no go, everything she used to eat such as garlic/joint supplements etc she wont touch! Only thing she will tolerate is mint in small amounts.

Thanks

 

[MagicMelon]

What about some kind of balancer? They're only meant to be fed in small doses but contain vits & mins etc.

Otherwise, you could try boosting her beet by changing it from speedi-beet to something like Alfa-Beet? And can you up her Hi-Fi? You can feed that as a partial hay replacer and basically feed it by the tubtrug full!

 

[Jane_Lou]

I have had great results with oldies with Spillers Fibre Cubes, soaked into a "mush" similar to weatabix. It seems to be like chocolate to horses and even sick and poor horses love it. If you have a weight problem you could add some baileys no1 which is great for weight gain and easily eaten by old teeth. My friends pony is 36, has very few teeth and lives hi-fi and redigrass instead of hay, buckets of speedibeet and hi-fi mix and the fibre cube/No1 mixture and looks amazing!

 

[Kallibear]

Have you had her teeth looked at recently? At 34 I'd suprised if she has many, if any, left! That will make her fussy about her food (too difficult to be worth eating unless is simply scummy

) That fact she'll eat speedibeet happilys that might be the porblem.

It would be worth looking at things that can be soaked to a pulp. Alfalfa cubes are high in protein and reasonably high in energy, plus are soaked, so worthing looking into. All of the 'cubed' feeds can be soaked to a mush too - there's various such as Build Up cubes.

Have you tried soaked readigrass (or similar) as a hay replacer? It smells lovely and goes soft when soaked for a couple of hours.

 

[Scranny_Ann]

Thanks guys, i have got another bag of Old Faithful and a bag of Conditioning Cubes. Introduced half a handful in her tea last night after adding rather a lot of water and she loved it

Kallibear - Her teeth are fine, she was last seen in April (i think) and her teeth are in excellent condition, he just took a few sharp edges off. She's just generally fussy with food, never been at all greedy! Think i'm just being overly cautious in the approach to winter, don't want her dropping condition now! Thanks again for replies