Feeding Your Horse

The Rules of Feeding Your Horse:
a) Feed your horse little and often, rather than giving large quantities of feed at one time.
b) Only feed your horse fresh food.
c) Match the amount of feed that you feed to your horse with the quantity of work your horse does.
d) Make sure that you do not exercise your horse straight after he or she has eaten.
e) If you want to introduce new feeds to your horse’s diet make sure that you do it gradually.
f) Your horse should be fed plenty of bulk food such as hay and grass.
g) Your horse needs to graze in a field for part of the day to be healthy.
h) If your horse is a stabled one, make sure that you feed your horse succulent like carrots, turnips and apples.
i) Keep your feeding pattern the same each day. You should feed your horse regularly and consistently every day.
j) Keep your horse’s manager and hay net clean.

Types of Feed and Hay:
a) Pony nuts – this horse feed looks like rabbit or guinea pig pellets. It is very easy to feed.
b) Coarse mix – coarse mix is a mixture of pony nuts and squashed oats. Like pony nuts, it is e asy to feed.
c) Bran – bran is a brownish feed that has a texture similar to that of ProNutro or Maltabella. It is often used in mashes which are fed to sick horses.
d) Flaked maize – this horse feed is made up of flattened and flaked maize. Feed all maize feeds to your horse sparingly.
e) Dry sugar beet – dry sugar beet looks just like a grey bran. You must soak all sugar beet feeds before feeding them to your horse.
f) Chaff – chaff is a mix of chopped up hay and straw. It is generally used as the mass of most horse feeds while the others are just mixed into it.
g) Micronized flaked barley – this feed is given to horses whose owners do not like to feed them oats. It looks a like Jungle Oats.
h) Soaked sugar beet – this is just dry sugar beet that has been soaked.
i) Bruised oats – bruised oats are loved by horses, but not so much by their riders and owners as oats tend to make the horses unmanageable. But if fed in small amounts, oats are fine.
j) Hay – hay is pretty much a mixture of edible grasses. It can be fed in bulk.
k) Lucerne – this is the dried stalks and sliced up leaves of the Lucerne plant. It does not have the flowers in it and it pretty much the same as hay.

Types of Treats and Supplements:
a) Mineral licks – a mineral lick is just a brownish block of minerals. Horses love these blocks and they are good for them because they give them any extra minerals they might need. You can place them in the horse’s stable or paddock.
b) Cod liver oil – a tablespoon of cod liver oil into one of the horse’s feeds each day in winter can give them vitamins.
c) Sweet, crunchy treats – these are apples, turnips and carrots. However, you must not feed your horse too many apples as they are known to cause colic. One a day is fine.
d) Sunflower oil – horses need a bit of fat in their diets, and by adding a tablespoon of sunflower oil to each of their feeds.

Feeding Your Horse Feed:
1. First, find out how much feed your horse needs by multiplying his weight by 2.5 and dividing the answer by 200. Then you need to decide what portion of this should be feed, which should be grass and which should be hay. You will need your tutor or an expert to help you with this.

2. Once you have determined how much feed you are going to feed your horse, measure out one fifth of it into his feed bucket. You must feed him this one fifth of his feed allowance early in the morning, mid-morning, lunchtime, mid-afternoon and suppertime.

P.S. You should also determine what sorts of feeds you are going to feed your horse. You will need to talk to your tutor or an expert about this because each horse is different.

Feeding Your Horse Hay:
1. First, find out how much hay your horse needs by multiplying his weight by 2.5 and dividing the answer by 200. Then you need to decide what portion of this should be feed, which should be grass and which should be hay. You will need your tutor or an expert to help you with this.

2. Once you have determined how much hay you are going to feed your horse, measure out one third of it into his hay net. You must feed him this one third of his hay allowance early in the morning, lunchtime and suppertime.

3. Take the full hay net to your horse’s stable. Inside his stable there should be a tying ring. Put the string of the hay net through the ring. Then, pull it up to about the height of your horse’s muzzle.

4. Loop the string through the rope mesh around the bottom of the hay net and take it back up to the tying ring. Then, put the end of the string through the ring again and secure the hay net in its place with a firm quick-release knot.

P.S. If your horse has a dust or breathing problem, then you must soak the hay net (full of the portion of hay, of course) in a clean bin full of water for a bit before you give it to him.

Letting Your Horse Graze:
1. First, find out how much grass your horse needs by multiplying his weight by 2.5 and dividing the answer by 200. Then you need to decide what portion of this should be feed, which should be grass and which should be hay. You will need your tutor or an expert to help you with this, as well as determining how much time it will take your horse to get the amount of grass he needs.

2. Unlike hay and feed, grass does not need to be fed to your horse a little at a time. If your horse needs to graze for three hours each day, you can put him in the paddock for three hours straight.

3. When you let your horse go into his paddock, you must never leave his halter or head collar on. It is very dangerous because your horse could get his halter hooked on something. If he panics, he could badly injure himself.

P.S. Some horses suffer from a condition called laminitis. Laminitis is a sickness that makes a horse’s hooves get inflamed so badly that they cannot walk. The only way to prevent this disease is by putting your horse in a nearly bare paddock, where there is not enough grass to make him sick. The only other way to deal with this is to stable your horse for most of the day and put him out in a lush paddock for short periods of time.