Horses Inside Out are currently hosting a series of 4 webinars with Professor Meriel Moore Colyer entitled ‘Nutrition Nurtures Everything’
I would like to share with you a little about part 1, ‘Feed The Need’
A fully jam packed webinar, giving a detailed ‘tour’ of the Equine Digestive system, a lesson on how to calculate your horse’s energy requirements, followed by a system of feeding your horse according to their need.
Professor Meriel Moore Colyer specialises in equine nutrition. She has published over 120 scientific articles, 4 text books and numerous popular press articles.She is a registered Animal Scientist with the Royal Society of Biology and chair of the European Workshop for Equine Nutrition Association.Having watched this webinar I feel it appeals to Equine Professionals and horse owners alike. Meriel has done a great job of finding a good balance between providing technical information in an easy to understand way.
As a horse owner I know that I will be now calculating my own horse’s energy requirements and assessing their diets with the knowledge I have gained from this.
As an Equine Professional I can now draw on this information to recommend clients assess their own horses or ensure they have someone on their team to help them with this by providing some background knowledge into why and how!
Due to my previous studies, I was already familiar with the anatomy of the Equine Digestive system, however what I learnt from this webinar was more about the process of the feed as it travels through the Digestive Tract and how each part contributes to the way the horse utilises the feed.
What was also fascinating was that by understanding this, we can tailor the way we feed our horses to help provide them with not only the right about of chewing time they need to satisfy them mentally and physically, but the right amount of saliva they need to aid digestion, water content of feed to assist gastric juices, make choices in what we feed to provide diversity in the microbiome, levels of protein that are optimum to allow optimum digestion for anabolic processes and to help the body grow & repair, supply required energy production or to assist in reducing Insulin dysregulation.
Wow !- And this is only part 1!
There are a few key points that help us to understand the needs of our horse, both as the Equid species itself and as an individual with their current body condition, level of activity, breed/type, eating habits (likes/dislikes) and management situation.
Just because they are a horse there will be certain aspects of feeding that need to be considered, this list is not exhaustive and Meriel goes into much more detail in the webinar but to give you an idea these include:
An appetite for 2.5-3% body weight per day in dry matter
10-15 hours per day of eating (natural behaviour, but also helps to produce saliva required to buffer the digestive system)
An Alkali diet (forage is good for this)
Trickle feeding to provide a steady flow of nutrients and to not overload the stomach (which cannot stretch to accommodate large amounts of food like a human stomach can)
A forage based diet, which will help provide a stable environment for the microbiome
A balanced diet - fibre diets can meet energy requirements but might not meet other nutrient requirements depending on where your forage has been grown - hence you will need to add nutrients to balance the diet to meet your horse’s RDA (recommended daily allowance)
Once you have the basic requirements covered, you will then need to consider your individual horse, and if they have a need for any additional nutrients or energy requirements.
Meriel tells us that most of the energy requirements of a horse are used for maintaining the body, and not much is actually needed for work.
Most leisure horses, working for example 3 days per week should be on maintenance only diets. And fatigue, which is related to muscle glycogen, can be replenished by simply feeding good quality fibre. But this is a slower process than feeding concentrates. So, if your bouts of exercise are close together e.g consecutive days, you may need to feed your horse concentrates to replensih this. However, if your horse has some days off between bouts of fast work they should be able to replenish this from good quality fibre.
With this information you can alter either your training plan or your feeding accordingly. For example at home you may not need to feed your horse concentrates as they can have rest days, but if you are away at a competition or camp for example and working hard on consecutive days, you may need to provide your horse a little concentrate to help with their recovery. You need to assess your individual horse and their regime and make an informed decision.
During the webinar Meriel shares a research backed and proven calculation that you can use at home to calculate your own horse’s energy requirements in Digestible Energy, which is provided on all feed bags (DE). Once you know this, Meriel’s recommendation for feeding looks like this (with a lot more added in during the webinar, including feed & product recommendations)
Forage - Hay, Haylage, Grass. Natural trickle feeding, slow release energy, valuable energy source, lower incidence of colic on fibre diets, good resevoir for water (good for the hindgut), Good source of electrolytes.
Highly Digestible Fibre Feeds - Sugar beet, alfalfa chaff, grass pellets. Depending on your horse’s energy requirements AFTER their hay ration
Fat or Oil - Vegetable oil, Linseed oil, Pelleted rice bran. If you need more energy requirement
Cereals - Oasts, barley, maize. If you still need further energy requirement. Keep meals small, if you feed cereals you will need to split into small, multiple meals per day, so that the cereal is digested in the small intestine and does not reach the hindgut and effect the mircrobiome here
Supplements - Forage only diets will need a balancer as previously mentioned. More on supplements in part 4 of this series coming soon!
Once you have taken a knowledge based, calculated approach to your horse’s feeding, how do you know that what you have done is the right thing? Well, that answer is to monitor the efficacy of your diet:
Use a weigh bridge of possible
Body condition score once per month
Keep looking at work level - has it changed? Do you need to change your feed to be appropriate?
Always ask, can I replace cereals with fibre?
I hope this blog gives you an insight into what Meriel shared in Part 1 of this series of webinars. I highly recommend purchasing access to this as there is so much more to learn. Part 2 - Healthy Lungs is coming next, I am really looking forward to that one :)
Jess
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