Horse won't eat barefoot diet!

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Shaznchaz

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So I have been having issues getting my horse to eat her healthy feed - she is just not interested at all (too much grass in the field)! I introduced it slowly and it was going well until I added the pro-balanceand now she won't touch it at all! She is fed fast fibre, hi-fi molasses free, mag-ox, brewers yeast, pro balance and salt.
I feel like I have tried everything short of molasses to try and get her to eat them. Apple juice, mint, carrots, Marmite. Also using speedibeet and grass pellets instead of the fast fibre. Everything works for a bit and then she just won't eat it! Any ideas?
 
She obviously isn't hungry and therefore doesn't need supplementary feeding. Cut the feed or up the work.
 
Cortez said:
She obviously isn't hungry and therefore doesn't need supplementary feeding. Cut the feed or up the work.
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This ...malus does she need the mag ox and pro balance at same time ? Yeast can taste vile too . If fed at the correct levels fast fibre is a balanced feed . My mare is bf and tbh can eat anything and be fine , she's normally in fast fibre and either power and performance or conditioning mix or barley. Fast fibre contains linseed now too , but I normally add linseed if she's a bit poor or doing more work
 
I feed mine spearmint with his pro balance to make it taste nicer, he just gets it with linseed and high fibre cubes. He got thoroughly bored with eating the hi fi molasses free.

That said I'm putting fronts back on soon as I want to compete,a nd with everything else don't have time to do the work for BF in the summer months, I'll probably take them off again in the autumn
 
Have a look at Agrobs Pre-Alpin. My word, that food smells like heaven in a bucket and I haven't found a horse that has turned their nose up at it. Low starch and sugar, it seems ideal for the barefoot diet.
 
I find that the magnesium isn't very palatable, and also that spearmint in quite generous amounts seems to work to make the feed more appetising. She obviously prefers the grass at the moment. Do you take her off the grass at all? When she is hungry is the time to give her healthy feed.
 
Don't shoot me but honestly, if your horse can't go barefoot without endless supplements, it should just be shod... Neither the supplements nor the shoes are "natural" so I wouldn't worry about that. But one is a lot less hassle for you and the horse than the other (and I do mean the shoes are simpler!) and is also less likely to cause health problems like changing feeds around can. If you have a different reason for keeping her unshod then fair enough - but I think you should take the first advice and try cutting down the feed to only what's absolutely needed to maintain her health and go from there.
 
Barnacle said:
Don't shoot me but honestly, if your horse can't go barefoot without endless supplements, it should just be shod... Neither the supplements nor the shoes are "natural" so I wouldn't worry about that. But one is a lot less hassle for you and the horse than the other (and I do mean the shoes are simpler!) and is also less likely to cause health problems like changing feeds around can. If you have a different reason for keeping her unshod then fair enough - but I think you should take the first advice and try cutting down the feed to only what's absolutely needed to maintain her health and go from there.
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Barefoot people might focus on it more but really I would be trying to feed a good diet barefoot or shod. I would want good horn quality even if shod, you don't want weak crumbly hooves that won't hold a shoe.

A 'natural' lifestyle would be one in which a horse roamed over a wide area and ate a variety of foods. If you have good varied balanced grazing then you maybe don't need to supplement but a lot of the land on which horses are kept these days, (at least where I am,) is too small, over grazed, lacking in variety in terms of grass species and other plants and is often lacking in some really basic minerals.

I found supplementing meant not only were my horses hooves better but I also had a shiner coats, thicker manes and tails, less prone to mud fever, stopped having allergic reactions and when i realised how high the local area was in calcium and stopped feeding calcium rich feeds less prone to explosive moments.

OP Is your horse out all the time or stabled some of the time? If stabled give the minimum feed just to carry the supplements just before turning out. There grass is very rich at the moment so they won't feel like eating much after a day grazing.

Also how quickly did you introduce the pro balance. I have one horse that is very suspicious of anything new - even treats and some grass- and I have to introduce anything new very slow over many weeks. Even if hungry he takes a while to decide anything new is going to poison him so I give him time to get used to new things.
 
Thanks for the replies everyone.

My pony is now 14 and has never been shod. Up until December she was fed molassessed mixes and chaffs with no issues or footieness at all, although she did have a balancer added to her feed. However, as I am away at university she wasn't getting enough work to warrent the mixes any more, and after discussion with my vet, farrier and nutritionist, this is the diet they recommended based on a forage analysis undertaken recently at my yard. This suggested that the grazing was low in magnesium and high in potassium, hense the magox and salt added to her feed.

She is currently out 24/7 but muzzled during the day (she hates being stabled). I try to feed her when the muzzle comes off but she still isn't interested, she just wants the grass!

What seems to work best at the moment is feeding her soaked grass nuts with a tiny amount of supplements in them. I am currently increasing the amount slowly in the hope that she won't notice!
 
Don't feed the balancer.

It took me ages to get mine to eat it, then ran out and ended up back to square one. He only gets metaslim and salt currently as his workload warranted it, however he wintered out with nothing but hay and a handful of feed (plain chaff) to carry the salt. His hooves have never been better.
 
I feel your pain! One of my horses is a right madam. Everything has to be added slowly or she will refuse to eat it; and sometimes she just decides she doesn't like it anymore.

My horses are all barefoot and currently are only getting grass and their hooves are still in great condition. Don't be too worried if she won't eat it. For now just give her what she will eat and start adding the extras in when the Spring grass has died down.
 
If you're interested in keeping your horse barefoot (as I am) the best advice I can give you is to NEVER feed your horse any of the 'off-the-shelf' balancers - the profess to have all the necessary nutrients for good feet, but as far as all of the ones I looked at, they simply don't.

On the advice of my barefoot trimmer, I was told to try the balancers from Forage Plus or Progressive Earth because Einar, my nearly-five year old Highland gelding had pretty soft feet up until a year ago; he was getting a little footy over hard ground and we were resorting to hoof ointments like Keratex and the Kevin Bacon stuff. We tried the Forage Plus stuff first, but he didn't seem to take to it very well, sometimes refusing to eat his feed - which wasn't a great start! Then we tried the Progressive Earth 'Pro Hoof' balancer and stuck to it as he ate it without any problems. A year on, he has the most amazingly hard 'rock crusher' hooves and hasn't been footy in the slightest throughout winter - we mix it with a little of Bailey's Lo-Cal chaff and a small amount of micronised linseed and would recommend it to all and sundry!

Link to the Progressive Earth eBay shop: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/progressiveearth?_trksid=p2047675.l2563
 
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