Watching horses graze

Eggshells

Eggshells

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My boy is on box rest with suspected ligament damage (scan tomorrow morning to confirm - wish us luck!). This means I am spending as much time as I can grazing him in hand and I am loving watching what he eats.. I am grazing him along a hawthorn/bramble/eldar hedgerow with nettles/thistles/dandelions/cleaves/clover etc etc among the grass. He doesn't pay any attention to the hedgerow - even the ripe blackberries which I enjoy and offer to share! He is very much a grass boy and loves the seed heads on tall grass. He usually avoids other plants, but every so often he will take the heads off thistles (esp sow-thistles) and demolish a dandelion or two. He also gives the grass a good sniff before settling down to graze a new area.

Anyway, this was a very long winded way of asking people what their horses loved/hated grazing on?

Also, anyone else find listening to a horse munch one of the nicest noises?
 
Alf makes a beeline for my willow trees when he comes out of the field. He loves dandelions and thistles, and will seek out and devour rosehips from the hedge. He's got arthritis in his hocks, and is very good at finding things with analgesic/anti-inflammatory properties
 
I love watching mine eat thistle heads, they are so precise. Mine does like blackberries as well though and we often stop on a hack by a nice big bush with me leaning over, we just rush to get the best ones first and he usually beats me!
 
Mine live on weedy, rough meadow, and eat things a goat would choke on. I love that they seem to decide as a herd what they're going to go after, and spend an hour or so in different parts of the meadow:

reaching up like goats to eat hawthorn or willow
stripping willow bark off fallen tree limbs
carefully rolling thistles with their tongue to avoid the spikes
demolishing nettle patches (used to be just old dead ones, but now they like them fresh)
reaching under the water to get pond weed, which they sometimes shake dry by tossing their heads before eating it
reaching in among long grass to get the bindweed and sticky weed
carefully nibbling fresh briar shoots in the spring
... and occasionally topping up with grass!
 
I used to love watching baby eat thistles. she would delicatly pick plowers off but sometimes -carefully - munch on the whole plant. i just stood wincing lol
 
My horses were at the end of the field today trimming back the hedge rows. my mare is a grass girl but the gelding loads all things sweet, blackberry bushes, the purple heads of thistles but will also eat the whole thistle plant! yesterday I was grazing him in hand and in 1 minute flat he'd munched his way through some tall weed looking thing! no idea what it was though!
 
I got some advice from a herbalist for my pony, the theory being that horses know what they need for optimum health and will seek those things out

We tried 6 different herbs/plant materials laid them out on a board and let him loose, it was really interesting to watch him react to that, what he chose decided what he needed in his diet apparently
 
I'm never convinced the horse picks what he needs in his diet rather than what he likes the best any more than if you put a tray of 6 things in front of a child they would pick what they needed in their diet rather than the chocolate.
I like watching mine eat though. Put him on a fresh patch and he is so efficient. Bite, chew chew, bite chew chew in a semicircle in front of him moving forwards just the amount needed to reach the next untouched bit. Never pausing or lifting him head up, not surprising he is such a good doer.
 
The grass in the fields isn't the best right now after the weather we've had :) I love taking my girl out in the woods and watching her eat. There's wild raspberry bushes which she went mad for in summer but which I'd rather she didn't have, probably why she thought they were so tasty. She likes the odd bit of burdock. Other than that I like to find her deep clover patches and watch her strip the lot, but mostly, she just wants short leafy grass. She's so careful in the way she eats she clears a track forward, it's quite amazing to watch.

I think just being with her while she grazes has improved her trust in me too, anybody else notice this?
 
My girls are on 38 acres of cattle pasture, so the big girl has to wear a greenguard muzzle all summer. I keep the diet topped up with balancer because it's almost impossible for her to self medicate with hedgerow goodies. I give them mint, parsley they love hawthorn leaves & berries & rosehips ( lovingly gathered by me !) she used to be very partial to nettles pre-muzzle ! don't worry about the raspberry leaves by the way - good for them ! lots of good books on horse herbalism on amazon. . . .
 
They do seem to know how to self-medicate. Dandelions, etc. But then they go and eat ragwort. Not so great. But that plant is sneaky.
 
So interesting to see what others like. Took Eggs to a rose bush this afternoon but no dice.. Although he was ridiculously on his toes and it was blowing a gale so possibly not the best time to gauge interest. He was definitely avoiding the nettles and loving the dandelions. I do think they know what they want.. I know I sometimes crave certain food stuffs and they aren't always of the chocolate or tangfastic variety!

As for the bonding through in hand grazing.. yes and no for me. I find he relaxes around me more (only had him a couple of months so still getting to know each other) but I lose some respect when it comes to not diving off after a particularly tasty patch of grass! I end up doing a fair bit of in hand work just to remind him that this maybe 'him time' but he still has to listen. I did find it brilliant when I fist got him - I spent hours grazing him in hand and watching his reactions. Made me trust and understand him a lot quicker than I might have done otherwise.

Thank you everyone for replying! xx
 
Mine love my rugosa hedge, so this year we have not had to trim it. The hazel is flat on the field side and the sweet chestnut has been grazed. They also like hawthorn, have stripped bark off my lilac and seem to leave the rowan alone, but have done a great job on the blackberry runners.

More worrying is seeing one try to reach the leaves on an oak which overhangs the field, so we have spent last two days making sure all the oaks are out of reach, and I am dreading the acornfall this autumn, we are going to have to exclude ponies from some areas until acorns are cleared.
 
The sun is already going down behind a line of bare trees. Its rays catch strands of un-muddied chestnut mane making them glow. On the ground, a drop of dew from melted frost reflects a tiny point of light with iridescent colour that changes as I move. I notice that the ground is covered with an all manner of detritus: oak and beech leaves, twigs, vestiges of dandelion and thistle plants surviving last autumn’s mowing, rabbit droppings, the odd scrap of white or silver paper, a feather, something that looks like a spider’s web. The surface is marked with hoof-prints from previous days.

It is fascinating to watch Max deal with this varied landscape. He navigates efficiently around the debris without interrupting the urgent rhythm of tearing and chewing. He can clear a leaf out of the way with a quick flick of his upper lip. When a piece of dry leaf does get picked up with the grass, it appears out of the corner of his mouth a few moments later. He seems to be able to tell the good stuff from the poor, passing more rapidly over mossy and etiolated areas. He likes thistle leaves, but is indifferent to dandelion. Our path meanders according to what takes his fancy. I presume he is using senses of smell and touch intensively to discriminate between the different qualities and textures of the vegetation. Yet it all seems so effortless!
 
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