Assessing and Satisfying the Insatiable Appetite

Written by Briony Witherow MSc RNutr. FHEA

In our last blog we looked at how to assess and manage a horse with a seemingly limited appetite. In this blog we look to the opposite end of the spectrum and consider those where appetite appears almost boundless. 

Assessing Appetite

For those with good doers that may be on a restricted forage ration, time how long it takes your horse to eat a set amount of their forage ration (1 or 2kg) depending on how much time you have. Over a couple of days this should give you a rough estimate of how long this set amount is occupying them for, multiply this up so that it gives you an estimate of the whole ration. With this information you can get an idea of how long the ration might be lasting and whether a slow feeder or some management to extend eating time may be beneficial.

Monitoring the number and consistency of droppings produced can also be an indicator of intake and knowing what’s normal can act as an instant indictor if things change. Where appetite is not quite being met, behaviours such as wood chewing, coprophagy (eating droppings) and consuming shavings or soil can indicate that their motivation to chew/eat has not been met (low fibre diets for example).

Top Tips for Satisfying Appetite

• Check minimum fibre requirements are met. Check you are providing sufficient fibre to meet minimum forage requirements in dry matter. Minimum daily requirements are 1.5% of the horse’s bodyweight in dry matter. Once you have worked out 1.5% of your horse’s bodyweight, you can divide by 0.85 for hay (using a typical 85% dry matter) or 0.6 for haylage (60% dry matter). This will give you their minimum requirement of hay or haylage per day. If you have analysis available, then you can use the actual dry matter of the forage instead of an average. For those where part of the ration is met by grass intake, this is incredibly tricky to quantify, but you can estimate it by using the following equation. Amount of grass in dry matter = (No. of hours grazing per day/24) x (2/100) x bodyweight in kilograms. If the grass is particularly sparse or low in quality, this would likely overestimate intake, but it provides a starting point.

• Divide the forage ration throughout the day. Consider how the forage ration is split over the day – very often we just split the forage ration in half between the morning and evening feeds when on paper the nighttime hours far exceed those needing to be occupied during the day. Research suggests that due to the horse’s sleeping pattern that it can be important to shift the balance slightly in favour of more during the day as the body is designed to fast naturally for a few hours during sleep overnight.

• Extend chew timeby using slow feeders and/or splitting the placement of forage between different areas in the stable or paddock. This can also serve to enrich the horse’s environment and using a combination of forage presentations may help to encourage natural foraging behaviours and increasing feeding time further.

• Select appropriate forage. If you are still struggling to fill your horse’s time and meet his need for fibre, you can try increasing the fibre by selecting higher fibre forage (later cut) or introducing a small amount of straw to the ration (maximum 30%), higher fibre feeds being thought to aid satiety.

• Maximise satiety. High moisture content feeds which essentially dilute the nutrients (like beet) can also be useful to encourage satiety without too many calories – A soaked, wet Stubbs scoop of unmolassed beet (roughly 150g dry matter) provides only 1.8MJ of energy but lots of volume.