Learning topic: Provide advice on health and nutrition
Feeding horses
There are many rules and important elements of horse care and management
that we should be aware of when preparing and feeding horses as well as
watering them. Most of these are based on commonsense and having some
knowledge of horse husbandry and care.
Common sense feeding practices
Try to adopt these commonsense rules every day when feeding and watering
horses to ensure that all the horses you are caring for, especially those
locked in stables, can maintain optimum health, appropriate body condition
and tolerate their exercise regime comfortably.
Some basic rules for good feeding practices could include:

Feed little and feed often—try to imitate feeding habits in nature.

Feed according to temperament, work load and body condition.

Feed sufficient fibre in the diet.

Only ever feed good quality feedstuffs to all horses, regardless of
their cost.

Make any feed changes slowly, phase in completely new diets over
10-14 days and make minor changes in feed blends over a minimum
of 3-5 days.

If bringing paddock horses into stables or yards, change them from
pasture straight to good quality lucerne hay, and phase in ‘hard’
feeds over 14-21 days. These horses are more prone to diet upset
because they would not contain any of the bacterial bugs, called ‘gut
flora’ to cope with what is in ‘hard’ feeds, but they can cope with
hay, because it is similar to digesting pasture, as long as the hay is
not too rich.

Feed a balanced individual diet to all horses.

Feed enough bulk and roughage in the diet to help the digestive
process and avoid problems like colic, constipation, or diarrhoea.
Remember, roughage exercises and cleanses the digestive tract.

Feed stabled or yarded horses something succulent every day if they
do not have any paddock access—make a habit of hand picking
some grass each day, avoiding weeds.
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
Follow a routine for feed times and try to stick to it.

Keep all eating and drinking containers and horse feeding utensils
clean.

When feeding horses, allow them uninterrupted time to eat and enjoy
their food, especially young or nervous horses. The best reward you
can give a horse is not only a feed, but time alone, especially horses
in training.

Feed horses according to the amount of exercise or work done, not
the amount anticipated.

To minimise waste, all feeds, including hay, should be fed in some
sort of bin or hay net.

Feed by weighing feeds correctly, not by volume or ‘guestimates’.
Common sense watering practices
Some basic rules for good watering practices could include:

Do the watering before feeding to minimise dust.

Scrub automatic nose bowl waterers out very regularly with a hard
brush.

Do not constantly top up water, change it and clean the bin regularly.

Smell and feel the water regularly. If it is sweet smelling, change it.

Check the water pressure on the float valves of automatic waterers
regularly to ensure that water lines are not blocked.

Always change the water of stabled horses on grain diets, as grain in
the water will sour it.

Complement feeding and watering with good husbandry, including
farriery, dentistry, vaccination, worming programmes, and adopting
considerate training regimes.
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Learning topic: Provide advice on health and nutrition
How the normal horse eats
The horse has flat-edged incisor teeth, and very mobile lips which work
together, with some assistance from their tongues, to lift feed, cut off feed
like grass and to pull the food into the mouth. The tongue pushes the food
back to the premolar and molar teeth, (the back teeth), which provide a
grinding surface. The horse grinds it food in a sweeping motion from side to
side.
One of the main reasons that they chew this way is because the upper jaw is
about 30% wider than the lower jaw. If they chewed their food in an up and
down motion like carnivores (meat eaters do), they would not be able to it
break food down small enough to swallow; plus the type of food that they
eat would not break down this way. Try putting a handful of stalky hay and
whole oats into your mouth and chomp them up and down and see how
much they break up.
Horses chew their feed fairly well before they swallow it. For instance, did
you know that it takes the horse several thousand jaw sweeps to eat a
kilogram of oats?
Other interesting facts about the horse’s feeding habits

Horses are normally always hungry and willing to eat: As mentioned
before, this is because the food does not stay in the actual stomach
very long. They do eat all their food, constantly sifting through their
bedding looking for the tiniest of morsels, and if given the
opportunity in the stable, they would probably eat almost
continuously.

Horses produce a lot of saliva, which they swallow: They do not
normally dribble and drool while eating and they do not salivate and
drool like a dog at the sight or smell of food. They drop little food
from their mouth while chewing, and their teeth make a distinct
crunch and grind noise while chewing their food. It is normal for
them to go and have a drink while eating; they often stand at the
water, finish what they are chewing before having a drink and then
return to their food.

They don’t often urinate when eating: Horses often do not defecate
either until they are finished. In the paddock, they often finish their
feed before drinking or eliminating wastes. If they are grazing, they
often stop and go to a urine spot to urinate, but often they just
defecate as they are grazing along, it depends on the horse and often
on the sex of the horse.

Coughing: Coughing when eating is not really normal and could
indicate a problem or that the food is too dry.
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Normal drinking habits in the horse
Horses suck water in through their lips, with their neck low and extended.
They swallow large mouthfuls at a time and easily consume many litres at
each visit to the water. It is quite normal for the ears to move slightly back
and forth with each swallow, and for a muscle above the eye to move in and
out with each swallow.
The average adult horse at rest in cool weather will drink 20-30 litres of
water daily. When the weather is hot or during intense exercise, the horse
will easily consume four times this amount.
Water is used in the horse's body to:

maintain the fluid content of blood and tissues

enable the body to take up nutrients and to digest

lubricate the digestive tract and keep faeces at the normal
consistency

maintain kidney function

provide fluid balance within the actual body

control body temperature

produce sweat for cooling during exercise or in hot weather

provide cooling of the body via the lungs.
Water requirements
Horses have different water requirements for different reasons, including:
Exercise
Working horses doing moderate work may lose up to 11 litres per
hour of fluid in sweat. They need to consume lots of water to make
up the loss.
Diet
If fed dry feed and hay, horses will need to consume more water. If
pasture is dry, their water consumption will also be increased. High
salt or high protein diets increase water needs.
Climate
Environmental temperatures, especially hot, humid conditions,
increase requirements.
Growth
Requirements for growth can be up 10-15% higher than an adult
horse of similar height and weight.
Urinary losses
The average 500 kg horse excretes around 17 litres of urine per day.
This has many variations.
Reproduction
Mares in season excrete 20% more urine than normal, because of
straining to pass urine when displaying oestrus, therefore
requirements would be increased.
Mares lactating, require 50-70% more water for milk production than
those that are not.
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Learning topic: Provide advice on health and nutrition
Gastrointestinal
losses
If horses are sick with diarrhoea, fluid losses are often substantial,
these horses require lots more fluid to make up the deficit.
Often they cannot consume enough water, even when forced into the
horse via a nasogastric tube, they still dehydrate.
These horses will die very quickly without intravenous fluid therapy.
Nutrition-related problems
Diet-related diseases caused by deficiencies, toxicities, or imbalances of
nutrients usually occur during periods of greatest nutritional stress. This
usually occurs during rapid growth of the foal or times when the equine
body is most in need of proper nutrition, eg during illness, recovering from
events and during times of stress. Common diseases of growing foals
include nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism, developmental
orthopaedic disease and contracted tendons.
Nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism is caused by an imbalance of the
amounts of calcium and phosphorus in the diet. Diets rich in organic
phosphorus and low in calcium can cause release of the parathyroid
hormone from the parathyroid gland in the neck of horses. This hormone is
released to stimulate removal of calcium from the bones of the animal in an
attempt to maintain normal blood levels of calcium. The calcium lost from
the bone is replaced by connective tissue resulting in enlargement of the
bones of the head. In fact, the disease is often called ‘Big Head’ because of
this abnormality. It also is sometimes called Miller’s Disease, because
historically it was seen commonly in the horses owned by wheat millers
who fed their horses large amounts of bran.
Developmental orthopaedic disease describes a variety of bone
abnormalities that occasionally occur in young, rapidly growing horses (and
other species). Various causes for these diseases have been reported,
including environmental, genetic, and nutritional. It is likely that there is not
one single cause of all cases, and many factors may interact. It has been
suggested that providing excessive amounts of feed to foals to attempt to
achieve rapid growth rates may promote the disease. It also has been
suggested that deficiencies of trace minerals, including copper, zinc, and
manganese may also play a role.
Contracted flexor tendons in foals have also been associated with rapid
growth rates and high planes of nutrition. Contracted tendons can occur
quite rapidly in foals; a concavity can develop in the hoof wall and the heel
will begin to rise within 24 hours. The name contracted tendons comes from
the appearance that the flexor tendons of the foot have contracted. However,
it is more likely that development of the flexor apparatus of affected foals
does not develop at the same rate as the rest of the limb, which results in the
pointed-toe appearance.
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