stickytoffipudding
says
When I first had my 14.1hh chunky cob vetted the vet (an extremely experienced vet with years of experience looking after endurance horses at high level competitions etc, all over the world) told me that my cob needed to lose about 100kg (16 stone!) I was horrified that he thought he was so overweight and when I asked if it was okay to feed him Alpha A, the vet's comment was 'endurance horses live on that.' He advised only 1-2hrs grazing a day and as much hi fi light as I could put in him. I was not sure that I wanted to go down this route and so I had the challenge of what to do instead. I can't say it has been easy, it has been somewhat of a challenge but is definitely do-able as the pic on my profile shows how good he looks.
Where to begin?
Start with a weigh tape (or if accessible a weigh bridge) and see what he is weighing in at now. Then you need to calculate what his normal maintenance feed allowance would be. This is usually 2% of the horse's body weight. For example: a 550kg horse.. 550 x 0.02 = 11kg of food a day to maintain his weight. Bearing in mind this does not mean hard feed, it's forage! :o)
If he is overweight (use fat scoring method - 1-9 usually more detailed than 1-5 look them up on a search engine) then you can reduce his feed to 1.5% of his body weight. I would not go lower unless your vet says it'd be okay. So 75% of 11kg is 8.25kg of forage food a day. The digestible energy in the feed is really important. Some hard feeds have as much as 14Mj/kg whereas some chaff has only 7.5Mj/kg. Try to stick to mainly forage with a low calorie balancer to ensure your pony is getting as few calories as possible whilst still maintaining plenty of bulk. Chaff such as hifi light is good for feeding. My cob lives on a diet of restricted grass (strip grazing - introducing a small amount at a time so he doesn't go bonkers and eat a week's worth in a day) and about a kilo of hifi a day with his low calorie balancer.
One of the most important things is exercise. The more you can do with him the better. The fitter he is the less likely he is to get laminitis and other problems later in life. An hour's exercise a day is often called 'light work' by feed manufacturers so don't think he needs more feed than you're giving him. Horses thrive well on low calorie, hi fibre diet. It is what they were designed to eat and they were also designed to walk about 20 miles a day in the wild in search of their food!
I'd also recommend finding out what type of grass your pony is grazing: rye grass types are much higher in protein and often too rich for horses/ponies and may encourage laminitis. Fescues and Timothy grasses are better. They are lower in calories and protein which is much better for horses/ponies... Hope that helps!
24 August 2010 06:35
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