pootleperkin
Well-Known Member
Ok, lets look at this differently: This animal is encountering quite a number of plants naturally - what sort of dose do you think this horse will receive?
They will eat ragwort if they have no grazing. You can see this horse is trying to eat grass, but there ain't much of it around huh? Then you have other variables/worries: Our old landowner knew nothing about horses and used to come in and cut the field, leaving hundreds of ragwort plants scattered around that we then had to go around and clear up. He wouldn't stop this practice, as he wanted the field to look tidy - this is what owners are often up against!
I should say that this type of pasture, as I have explained previously, is VERY common up in the North East and no doubt in many other areas of the country. The horse that I know that died of liver damage was kept in a paddock like this. The owner could not be arsed to manage the paddock, nor I guess had the time or money to do so, had they had the inclination.
Some responsible owners also have horses in paddocks like this. I was one of them; my horse was in a paddock adjacent to the one in which the horse died and it also looked like this when we first moved there. We didn't have alternative pasture. For about 4 - 5 years, my family and I conscientiously cleared the paddock of ragwort each year until we had a ragwort free field. Perhaps you can understand that most horse owners don't want their fields to end up looking like this, and many of them are on similarly challenging pasture - often overgrazed in the past with no budget to improve it in the future. Therefore, if we see Ragwort, it goes! We don't all have access to acres of beautifully managed, predominantly grass-species rich fields.
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