Maintaining your horse’s weight is no less than a challenge. Horses have this tendency to eat more if they get enough food in front of them and add extra pounds to their weight. A bulky horse is not at all good for its own health. Previously, this mean of obese horse is not that of a big deal, but now it has because of the unhealthy ratio among horses. If you really want your horse to maintain that health, then it is mandatory that you head for the best tips to maintain its health and weight before actually feeding it with hay.
Replacing grains and other concentrates with quality roughage:
Despite people’s belief, most of the horses won’t need grain on daily basis. They can always get the basic minerals and vitamins through diet of grass, hay and even roughage. So, it is mandatory for you to replace the horse’s feed with soaked beet pulp. It will help in providing the same calorie value as the feed but minus the hard to digest sugars and starches. If you are planning to feed grains, then avoid feed with corn, excess sugar and even high starch level. You might want to feed grain with less than around 3.5% fat.
Try double bagging hay nets:
Replacing grains and other concentrates with quality roughage
It is mandatory to make the horse works a lot harder to get hay and it will force him to eat rather slowly. This form of double bagging will keep him to chew for long, and will provide constant food and saliva that might help in buffering acids in stomach and also protecting the horses from ulcers. This form of food is quite good for the brain as well and will alleviate food envy based issues. For some help in this regard, you can try getting some ideas from TVG in no time for sure.
Try to re-evaluate the horse hays:
Horses are quite amazing at ways to extract what they want from natural food sources. So, you can avoid feeding any protein rich alfalfa and even clover hay, which might prove to be high in calories than those grass hay or mature timothy. Even though mature hay calls for lower quality hays, but it will surely taste sweet and will smell fresh. Here, low quality only means low in sugar and calorie, but not in quality. So, be sure to add this content in your horse’s diet plan.
You can limit access to spring grass:
Even though most horses are healthier and happier with regular turnout, it is vital to acclimate horse to some new spring grass in a slow manner, whether it is on diet or not. New grass might cause some digestive tract issue and with increased colic and laminitis risk. So, going for the spring grass might be a good option so far.
For some more details in this regard, log online and try working on ways to maintain your horse’s healthy diet. Things will turn out towards betterment
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