Horse dropping weight...help!

[TGM]

TGM, so does that mean i should choose between either doing a big feed of sugar beet/fast fibre or similar...or doing a smaller feed with build up (just plucked that out of my head, i mean some kind of mix or cereal) lol

i sound pretty clueless overall lol

Sort of! Personally I wouldn't use something like Build Up (or any other high cereal mix/cube) for a horse with a tendency to be sharp. But you can get conditioning feeds that are low in cereals but still high in calories - such as TopSpec Cool Condition Cubes, Pure Feed's Pure Condition etc.

As an example, high fibre cubes usually have a 'calorie count' of about 8 MJDE/kg whereas conditioning cubes are usually at least 12 MJDE/kg. So if you fed 2kg of conditioning cubes you would be supplying 24 MJDE - to obtain the same 'calorie count' from high fibre cubes you would need to feed 3kg. Does that make sense?

Going back to the sugar beet and feed size issue - the idea of limiting feed sizes relates to cereal-based feeds. If too large a cereal feed is fed then undigested cereal starch is pushed from the stomach through to the hindgut causing problems. However, if you are only feeding fibre and not cereals (ie beet, alfalfa, grass products etc) then this problem does not arise, just in the same way we don't limit the size of haynets we feed our horses. Additionally, feed size is usually based on dry weight - lots of people add quite a bit of water to bucket feeds, or feed cubes soaked, but this water is not added into the feed weight calculation. Plus you can't add into the equation the amount that a horse might drink whilst eating. One of our horses is on condition cubes and likes to have a good drink whilst eating, but that doesn't cause him any problems or mean that the condition cubes become less conditioning because there is water mixed with them!

 

[lcharles]

My 17hh ISH was very similar, a bit ribby and tucked up looking. His hips were a bit sticky outty and he didnt look great! x Hes just started to fill back out a bit and look a bit better! x Hes 's quite a stressy horse which i dont think really helped. He was on hay when in and was out for 10 hours a day but now he's out 24/7 on ok grass (apart from few puddles at the moment!) and doing less fast work and seems that he's bulked up a bit. I think mine was because he was losing more calories through working and not getting enough. x