How to Feed Your Horses Right

Feeding your horses is one of the emotional rewards you will get from taking care of equines especially when you hear them whinny after a much satisfied hours of munching. Feeding horses is no joke. It requires proper calculations as you need to be mindful of the amount of nutrients that goes to your horses’ digestive system. Sometimes, you tend to get excited feeding your horses that you give them more food. Overfeeding is dangerous as it can cause serious damage or imbalance to the digestive system of your equines. Like humans, they will work more efficiently and they will be healthier if they keep a balanced diet, and as the horse owner, that depends greatly on you, especially if they are living in stables and cannot graze freely on pasture lands.

So, how do you feed your horses properly?

Well, one of the horse’s feeding needs that you should know is that an average equine can only use not more than 5 pounds of feed in a single meal. Any amount more than that preferred amount is useless, as they will only poop them out and the nutrients will not be utilized. For this reason, you should break down horse feeding into two or more times a day.

Suddenly increasing the ration of the horse’s feed is not helpful. If the horse’s need to have more feeds, make sure that you give it to them gradually so it will not result to the imbalance of its digestive system. Ideally, you should not increase their feed more than a pound per single meal over the whole week.

Instant change in their diet is also not a good practice to make. If you are planning to introduce a new kind of feed to your horse, make sure that you mix it with the old one, for 7 – 10 days. Horses are habitual and abrupt changes can result to negative effects.

Give them more hays than feeds, or feed them with these two equally. This means that if your horse receives 6 pounds of feeds a day, they should also eat 6 pound of hays that day.

You might think that feeding a horse is difficult and very stringent because of the exact amounts and specifications that you need to follow. Yes it could be, but once you are used to it, it will just be as easy as pie. Also, you are allowed to make some slight changes in the feeding amounts of your horses, depending on their built, on the training they are undergoing, and their current condition (i.e lactating, pregnant, nursing a foal).