lucymay9701
Well-Known Member
I would be really grateful for some advice on this please. I have a 15.3hh 26 year old thoroughbred mare. She is just starting to lose a little bit of weight and so I want her to put it back on and maintain it. She has allergies and is prone to itching - this has started over the last year, although she is doing well with them at the moment. Although we have never fully found out the cause of the itching molasses is one thing that seems to make it worse. We also try to keep her diet as 'natural' as possible. She would usually have conditioning cubes to keep weight on her but they mostly have molasses included. She doesn't like grass pellets, soaked or dry! However she likes the graze on dried grass. She is currently fed this with speedibeet and micronised linseed along with progressive earth pro balance. We have started increasing her dried grass (well it gets dampened before feeding!) but I am interested to know how much others feed. She is retired and has ad lib timothy horsehage. On the graze on bag it says for light work it can be fed up to 10% of the total diet and for medium work up to 40% but I am unsure what to feed her as she isn't in work. We have started to build her up to approx 10% of her total diet which is about 1.2kg. She eats about 12kg of Timothy horsehage a day. I'm just wondering if people think it would be OK to feed more grass than this if this amount doesn't increase/maintain her weight or is this about right? Shes not up to that amount yet as just increasing gradually so not sure yet if it will be enough. I'd be interested to know what amount of dried grass other people feed? Another option is to add in some allen and page veteran vitality which is molasses free but it does have other things like soya in which we try to avoid but obviously don't want her to lose weight so have to get the balance right! Any help is much appreciated x