Maintaining weight on your horse during winter can be tricky as horses use additional energy to keep warm, combined with the lack of pasture with nutritional value.
Follow our tips to keep on top of your horse’s condition this winter:
Assess your horse’s body condition
It is important to remember to remove your horses’ rugs throughout winter and review their body condition. It is easy to get stuck in winter in the wet, cold periods and forget to take your horse’s rugs off which can disguise their true body condition.
Horses that are underweight before winter starts will be more susceptible to excess heat and weight loss and will require additional calories to keep warm. Overweight horses are less likely to require additional calories and can benefit from a maintenance diet.
Feeding fibre to keep your horse warm
Pasture quality drops off during winter even if you have plenty of it. Horses need to be provided with enough quality fibre to keep them warm throughout the colder months. Fibre can come from many different sources including pasture, hay and hay cubes. Firbe is digested in the horse’s hindgut via a fermentation process which generates the heat to keep your horse warm. This ‘natural furnace’ keeps your horse warm from the inside out, allowing them to conserve energy during cold snaps.
Producing heat from fibre does take energy, which means horses who aren’t fed enough forage can lose weight as opposed to maintaining it. At a minimum, horses require 1.5% of their body weight in fibre per day. For a 500kg horse, this equates to about 7.5kg of hay per day.
TIP: Ensure you are feeding long-stem fibre such as hay or hay cubes.
Long stem fibre promotes chewing and saliva which assists in buffering stomach acid. This can assist with preventing digestive issues over winter.
Using fibre to maintain or increase weight over winter
Similarly, to using fibre to keep warm, increasing fibre can also assist with maintaining or even increasing weight over winter. If you are looking to increase the weight on a horse with a poor body score try feeding lucerne hay or hay cubes which highest protein content. Protein is used for energy, and when energy is not used the protein will break down and get stored as fat.
Remember horses have to be fed more protein than they are using to start to store it as fat, so factors such as work levels need to be considered.
Check their teeth
Ensuring your horse’s dental work is up to date, so they get the maximum benefit from their feed over winter.
Keep your horse’s drinking water
As the weather gets colder, horses often drink less which can lead to dehydration or even impaction colic because there isn’t enough water in the digestive tract. This can lead to feed ‘balling up’ and creating blockages.
There are a couple of different ways to keep your horses hydrated throughout the winter period:
- Soak their feed and hay.
- Provide warming winter mashes.
- Adding salt to their feed can encourage horses to drink.
- Ensure water troughs are not frozen or the water isn’t too cold.
TIP: Hay Cubes love water: Feeding soaked hay cubes is a great way to ensure horses are getting enough water at feed time.