Food for very fussy cushings horse

H

Horseperson432

Well-Known Member
Joined
29 December 2016
Messages
80
Visit site
Looking for suggestions for foods for an extremely fussy Cushings horse as close to the 10% Sugar and starch content as possible.
Tried and doesn’t like/ has gone off Cushcare, Meadowsweet, spillers veteran mash, fast fibre (honesty tried most of the “obvious ones”).
Pony has gone from looking great and eating enough to maintain his weight to really dropping now the grass has stopped coming through. Unfortunately this is my 2nd round with a Cushings pony- my first Cushings pony was kept on a very strict diet and if I’m honest, possibly foolish, I don’t want to do that again after seeing how unhappy it made him, I’d rather he have a better quality of life than a longer out less enjoyable one so I am happy to go above the 10% but if possible want to keep it as close as I can!!
Thank you
 
I used to add a small single handful of high fibre nuts to my pony's Cushcare. I'm sure they were just over 10% but not by much. She also liked Speedibeet.

Is the lack of appetite due to Prascend or is he usually fussy? If it's down to Prascend, decreasing dose for a few days, then building back up slowly sometimes helps, as does splitting the dose AM and PM.
 
I have a similar problem with my elderly shetland. He has gone off cushcare, spillers senior mash, fast fibre which was his absolute favourite. He does still like a mixture of sugar beet with Emerald green meadow magic grass nuts.
 
If his Cushing's is well controlled then just feed him what he’ll eat even if it’s soaked pasture nuts or some such, don’t get hung up on the sugar content. You don’t want him to drop a lot of weight so early in the winter.

I have had to drop my senior PPID mare down from 2 tables a day to 0.5 tablets a day as she was tolerating the Prascend less well, and this has given her a new lease of life. She won’t eat big bucket feeds of any type.

It’s always a balancing act with PPID equines.
 
The Royal Dick vets did an online course years ago now, and they recommended adding some oil to feed if weight gain was the main goal. Just vegetable oil. I think you had to start with smaller amounts and then increase, and you'd have to google/ask them or a vet about exact amounts. There was a maximum they would not go beyond, but the advantage of oil in your case is that it is sugar-free.

ETA their other predominant recommendation was forage, forage, forage, more forage - for all horses, rather than hard feed. They pretty much said that very few horses are in enough hard work to justify hard feed - the course was sponsored by Dengie (iirc) and I was thinking they would not have liked the advice given out 🤣 (obviously not so relevant in this case, more in general)
 
Last edited:
It was several years ago now, but I tried so many different feeds for my horse when he became super-fussy when he was on Prascend.

In the end, I found he would eat Topspec Comprehensive Balancer, with the Topspec Cool Condition cubes, and he did really well on it.

ETA: I forgot to add that he had an extra feed added, so he had 3 x feeds a day which I think made a big difference.
 
Last edited:
Kia was as fussy as it gets and his staple base feed was grassnuts/alfalfa nuts/beetpulp mixed together and soaked and Dengie senior chaff and linseed meal. He got that four times a day and twice a day I added a cup (dry) of equerry conditioning mash soaked and once a day he got a cup of suregrow stud balancer added. His feeds were all nice and soft.

He was looking good on that regime. The feeds weren’t big they were just full of fibre and oil.

I tried every mash on the market almost, he was cereal intolerant so I had to watch him carefully but th above worked for us.
 
Have you tried veteran vitality? I feed 1/2 scoop of Honeychop senior, a balancer, with a handful of saracen conditioning cubes (best thing ever apparently) in a small amount of veteran vitality (he likes it made warm).
 
Give Rowan Barbery a ring. They are very helpful and have several products suitable for all sorts. Some of the equine charities use RM and I've had experience myself with a very elderly dental compromised pony.
 
Have you tried Fibre Beet? Everything I've fed that to seems to love that and it's conditioning. Alternatively everything seems to go crazy for TopSpec Ulca Kind cubes, I think they must put crack in them or something as mine will break down the feed room door if someone leaves a bucket of them lying around :oops: (they're not even his feed!)
 
My cushings mare loved Baileys light chaff , it smelt very minty, she had hers with fast fibre but understand yours has gone off this . When mine stopped eating she had been on prascend for well over a year and suddenly wouldn’t eat hay either , she lost lots of weight and I was close to putting her down , I contacted lots of feed companies and asked for samples… I also got different bales of hay and as a last resort I tried haylage, the high fibre one, and she started eating again. I gradually added hay and eventually she would eat hay on its own and I didn’t have any further problems
 
Last edited:
Following with interest as my little cushings sec b has gone off his hi fi lite. He eats the fast fibre and carrots, spits out the hi fi but is clearing all his hay and nibbling his straw too. Teeth OK

Would like to replace the hifi with something but not sure what. He gets a small handful of pony nuts in an old welly boot to give him something to occupy him for an hour or so. Holding weight and condition well but want to keep his fibre intake up if I can
 
MyBoyChe said:
Following with interest as my little cushings sec b has gone off his hi fi lite. He eats the fast fibre and carrots, spits out the hi fi but is clearing all his hay and nibbling his straw too. Teeth OK

Would like to replace the hifi with something but not sure what. He gets a small handful of pony nuts in an old welly boot to give him something to occupy him for an hour or so. Holding weight and condition well but want to keep his fibre intake up if I can
Click to expand...

Mine are on Mollichaff Hoofkind as one of mine doesn't like course chaff.
 
Mine has spells where she goes off her food, I add apple juice to it and she goes back to devouring it but she doesn't get a big feed so doesn't need much apple juice to sweeten it up.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top