Feeding old horses

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janicesponies

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My old chap of 26 eats Dodson and Horrell mix and nuts and chop and speedi beet but is hardly eating any hay now. I have tried haylage but he does not find that easy either. His teeth have been recently attended to by dentist and he is up to date on worming. I have come to the conclusion that I need a chop type product to start replacing the hay - any suggestions please? How do I feed it?
 
Hi showponies,

I had the same problem with my 26 year old mare this winter. Fortunately she is now eating soft meadow hay.

Ok, so the advice I was given was to ensure that your horse receives a minimum of 1.5% of its body weight in fibre. so a 500kg horse would require 7.5kg is forage.

I made my hay replacer up of Allen and Page Fast Fibre (but any soaked high fibre cube is good), Speedibeet and Dengie Hi Fi.

I made this in 2 seperate Tub Trugs. One with the mush of cubes and speedibeet and one with the chaff. You dont have to seperate but I did this 1) so that my pony had a bit of variety in her stable and 2) so that I could monitor what she was eating ie if she started to struggle with the chaff.


Hope this helps.
 
I agree, Veteran Horse Website is good. Dengie offer some great advice on their website too and will send out samples of chaff. Simon from Allen and Page was of great help and sent me a money off voucher :-)

Keep and eye on your horse's weight if he can no longer eat hay. Its amazing how much hay can make a difference to a horse's weight.
 
For a 34 year old arabXwelsh my friend feeds - one large tub trug of ready grass, one bucket with two scoops of fast fibre (dry measure) and one bucket with mollichaff in and finally one bucket with two scoops of hifi senior, half a scoop of baileys veteran mix and half a scoop of alfa beet.

She's lost weight every single winter for the last two years until this year when my friend stopped trying to feed her hay or haylage and put her on all this instead. She looks amazing, she's hardly lost any weight and her coat is very shiny. She's well rugged up and goes out for 5-6 hours every day on four acres and she's the only horse. She acts like a 4yr old and is very naughty and still shows off by cantering round the field flirting with the hunters that are kept next door!! Xx
 
I feed a large high sided skip of Just Grass along with hay. Depending on how nice the hay is & how hungry she is she will eat a bit of both but mine's teeth arent good enough to just be on hay & she does usually finish her jus grass. However seemed to get depressed without the hay to chew. She seems to like Just Grass. She just kicked the skip around the stable when i tried her on hi fi & also hi fi lite!! In a kind of angry protest at 'lite'. Could just see the look on her face!! Kind of like being presented with a bowl full of lettuce!!! haha
 
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