Horse refusing hay

FionaDenmark

FionaDenmark

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But is eating the straw from her bed and her feed as usual. So it must be the quality of the hay? It doesn't seem musty or dusty at all and the quality has always been great with zero weeds.
 
I've had 2 large bales which mine wont eat. It smells weird, I'm wondering if it has been treated with preservative, possibly too much. Pretty gutting as it's so expensive. The hay has been random this year as the supplier is getting it from anywhere they can so I've changed to haylage now.
 
nutjob said:
I've had 2 large bales which mine wont eat. It smells weird, I'm wondering if it has been treated with preservative, possibly too much. Pretty gutting as it's so expensive. The hay has been random this year as the supplier is getting it from anywhere they can so I've changed to haylage now.
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Yep it's pretty gutting when they won't eat it because of the price. Mine costs 40 danish crowns a small bale which is about 6-7 quid.
 
FionaDenmark said:
It's Danish hay. It was very dry over here during the summer but I don't think we reached drought status. It could be bitter though.
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Duh of course. I presume it would depend on the grass varieties, the soil type, etc., as to the effects of a lack of water, so it's probably not possible to say one way or another whether it was or wasn't dry enough to affect the taste. But it's just one possibility that unfortunately you can't do much about :(
 
We used to have 4 at livery, we fed them on small bale hay bought from YO. The 2 who were stabled next to each other were usually fed from the same bale. One morning I got there to find one of them had colic and a full ration of untouched hay. She had eaten her straw bed. Her neighbour and the other 2 had eaten as normal. We never did work out what the problem had been.
 
this could have been written by me. My mare started on the new hay about a week ago and had been eating it but suddenly decided she doesn't like it. I tried mixing it with a different type and soaking it and even a little haylage but nope she would eat everything but. It turns out that this year they added a new grass to the seed to improve the hay and my other horse eat it fine. This mare is eating older hay that was for the sheep and far poorer quality but I wonder if it's because she was starved before I had her and she just isn't sure of it
 
nutjob said:
I've had 2 large bales which mine wont eat. It smells weird, I'm wondering if it has been treated with preservative, possibly too much. Pretty gutting as it's so expensive. The hay has been random this year as the supplier is getting it from anywhere they can so I've changed to haylage now.
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I bought some lucerne (alfalfa) hay once that smelled like fumes (from a vehicle) when I got it home and was putting it away. I took it back, explained what it smelled like, and the seller was p*&^d off with me. (He was awful even at the best of times.) When I said I'd have a sack of lucerne chaff instead, he whinged that that was made from the same hay, but it smelled fine to my nose (which is a good nose) so I disregarded what he said.

Sorry, all this to say that if I didn't like the smell of hay or chaff, I wouldn't feed it.
 
Sometimes they are just picky I think, I think they can also get 'bored' of a type of hay. We're on big bales but the one I have on full livery decided he wasn't that keen on our last bale despite there being nothing wrong with it and everything else eating it. Then we got a new delivery and he loved that hay.... for a week or so, before he got bored of it. I tied him up in the wash bay where there was an old net of the last bale that he hadn't liked at the time, and he started devouring it like he'd never been fed! He will also try to drag me over to steal his neighbours soaked hay, but if I fed him soaked hay he would refuse it. And he will turn his nose up at the same hay in his stable but eat it when it's put out in the field.... When fresh straw goes down they will all come in and eat their beds for a short while before going to their hay, I think it's just something different. - I wonder if it's all tied to their natural instinct to forage and seek out variety in their diet? I despair sometimes but he isn't wasting away so I've stopped losing sleep over it :rolleyes:
 
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