Leo Walker
Well-Known Member
Following on from my little horses weird behaviour I was doing some further reading and came across this:
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They seem to have missed the obvious solution of leave the horse out without a mask and rug if its not distressed but what do people think?
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Wild and naturally grazing horses eat to maintain a full gut.
Feeding consists of bouts of uninterrupted feeding separated by non-feeding intervals.
Feeding doesn’t occur randomly but is divided into ‘meals’. During meal times horses take short (less than 10 minute breaks) to ‘look around’, stand guard or to walk over to see what their neighbour is eating. There are longer periods between meal times for sleeping and resting, the feeding habits are very like deer.
Meal lengths are affected by the time of day and they prefer to eat in the day rather than the night.
Meal times in April are around 3 hours and 20 mins long, dropping to just 1 hour and 10 mins in October, the change in the length of the meal time is due to the increase in the fibre content of the grass as the season goes on, suggesting that horses eat to fill their gut and to maintain a high gut fill level.
In April though the nutritive value (glucose/starch/protein) of the green shoots are high whilst the biomass is low meaning they need to consume a greater quantity before the gut is full. Perhaps this partially explains why horses appear to gorge in spring and why grazing masks worn for long periods may cause a level of stress. Might be better to feed a hay net of low quality fodder before turning out to fill his gut first?
During times when flies are a nuisance, meal times are much shorter, horses stop feeding to rub themselves on each other and to groom each other, intervals between meals are longer and horses no longer feed until full but have longer periods of walking in between. Average feeding bout in between grooming and rubbing is around 25-45 seconds, literally snatching a bite to eat!
This change in routine coincides with mid- season when glucose/nutritive is still high and fibre content is also high enough to allow less time eating before gut fill level is achieved. Flies become a nuisance in the UK from the beginning to mid-June onwards, and in the fly season feral horses graze for much longer periods between the hours of 4am and 8am.
In the light of this information is it therefore better to bring the horse in from the field to avoid the flies, giving a little low quality hay to nibble, reducing the calorie intake through the day as nature intended, or would you put on a fly mask and rug and leave him out to eat high nutrient value grass until his gut is full
They seem to have missed the obvious solution of leave the horse out without a mask and rug if its not distressed but what do people think?