How Many Bales Of Hay?

[Miss L Toe]

The cage is dependant on the animal's size.
If you feel so strongly about this then go and tell yard owners to demolish their stables and to rebuild ones that accommodate your idealism of how horses should be stable!
I know what response you would be given.
What a strange person you are indeed.

I subscribe to WHW, and am a person who likes animals to have a happy life, there are plenty like me.
PS
My bed is 6 ft by three foot but my bedroom is 15 by 15
MY horse looks out on the world though the square window.

 

[Fantasy_World]

I subscribe to WHW, and am a person who likes animals to have a happy life, there are plenty like me.

Exactly the same as me then. Clearly you don't seem to have judged me correctly then, since I have exactly the same concerns when it comes to animals as any of my friends and family would concur. Frankly I think a lot more of animals than people!

 

[Crazy_cat_lady]

It often depends on the size of the bale as you can get some very small ones with tiny little sections or large ones with big fat "sections." Or vice versa.

 

[Fantasy_World]

It often depends on the size of the bale as you can get some very small ones with tiny little sections or large ones with big fat "sections." Or vice versa.

I would agree with that. Perhaps the OP should weigh the nets and feed by the weight rather than the number of slices as they do vary, even in the smaller bales. There are plenty of charts online which state how much forage a horse should be fed in a day. Farmer's Guardian did a feature recently on hay and haylage and recommended that a horse be given at least 1% of its bodyweight in roughage per day.
see here for link http://www.farmersguardian.com/home...#8211;-what-is-the-best-option-for-your-horse

I usually work on between 1.5 and 2% of bodyweight on my own horses depending on time of year, access to good forage, temperatures, workload and what hard feed is given.
I weight tape and all are easy to do except for the big lad who is 17.2 and a heavy horse cross. None of the weight tapes I have seen or used are long enough to give a true reading so I have devised my own system of estimating his girth by using a combination of tape and baling twine and using the markers on the tape to work out what his weight should be. I don't have access to a weighbridge so for me I have found this the easiest way to do it.
For a 18.3 hand horse though I am not so sure since the girth will be much larger than my lad's lol.
There is also a weight calculator here http://www.thehorse.com/Tool/Weight-Calculator.aspx
I have not used this method myself although I am sure that some forum members have and can describe whether it is effective or not.

However I think working on the basis of using a bale a day for the horse would be a fair estimation and if the OP does use less then it just means she will have some left over to use at another time. At the end of the day as with any new horse it is all based on trial and error and any consumption of food, be it forage or hard feed is purely based on estimates since no one can predict the weather, illness, if the horse had to be kept in for any reason, poor grass ( or frozen fields), injury and workloads.