Horse refusing to eat oily herbs.

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Cosmogirl

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Have been reading up lately on oily herbs and the benefits of feeding them. My hors would hugely benefit as suffers from sarcoids and has had ulcers in the past. I went ahead and bought thyme, oregano and rosemary and mixed them all together.....but my horse will not touch them. Started with a small amount and she blank point refused. Even a slight pinch in her feed with added mint and she can detect it ....Does anyone have any genius tips to try and disguise them?
 
Mine disliked one of them, I think the oregano. I added it a pinch at a time and also added spearmint to the mix. Was happily eating a full dose in a few months.
 
Try them separately not in a feed. Also do some summer foraging inhand with your horse, let them pick from the hedgerow and self select and then try again with the individual herbs.
 
As above, I'd try one by one- you might find fenugreek helps as well. What are you feeding them in? If it's just chaff then, assuming your horse isn't on a diet, you could try a mash feed such as Veteran vitality. You can usually pick up trial bags of those kinds of feed to test it out without committing to buying a bag.
ETA when I first started feeding seaweed they refused to eat it. I started with a small amount in the summer (when they didn't need any hard feed really) and just kept offering it. Once they realised that they weren't going to get a bucket feed sans seaweed they started eating it!
 
SEL said:
Its often rosemary because its quite pungent. I added mine to breakfast because that's usually when they're hungriest
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I let my horse self select the different herbs - the theory being they eat what they need. Rosemary is never a choice, and it’s interesting seeing how different the choices are for different horses.

I also make a strong ‘herb’ tea and then add to a bucket of water and let the horses choose which bucket they like.

They also like cleavers (fresh not in a tea) which is the ‘sticky bud’ weed, so you can pull that up for free for them to try …. it’s meant to be very good for lots of things.
 
canteron said:
I let my horse self select the different herbs - the theory being they eat what they need. Rosemary is never a choice, and it’s interesting seeing how different the choices are for different horses.

I also make a strong ‘herb’ tea and then add to a bucket of water and let the horses choose which bucket they like.

They also like cleavers (fresh not in a tea) which is the ‘sticky bud’ weed, so you can pull that up for free for them to try …. it’s meant to be very good for lots of things.
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I'm not very convinced about this. They will almost always eat rye-grass (or sugar lumps for that matter) to excess, given the chance, but quite often not things that have at least theoretical benefits (e.g. fat hen, oily herbs, self-heal). And then they'll go and eat things that are enormously toxic just because they're palatable (e.g. hemlock water dropwort, also very palatable to humans, apparently). I've seen a horse in a field of long grass eating ragwort (admittedly only once). And I've had a zoopharmacognosy enthusiast tell me a horse eating hemlock was self-medicating, although they were unable to tell me the safe dose. I'd love self-medication to be a thing but I'm not sure it is, and we've mostly denuded their environments too much for them to practise it if it were.
 
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