I can not believe the obese horses especially in the dressage world…and a lot have metabolic issues. My horses don’t have hay in front of them 24/7 and I have never had a horse founder. I feed according to the need of the horse because I am not going to make one suffer with founder.
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I suppose you’ve never had a horse that’s cranky when being ridden on an empty stomach. I have. I guess you’d think I was spoiling her by not insisting that she work on an empty stomach.
To me this is basic horse care 101… if night check was at 8 or 9 and the horse has not been fed since then, it’s going to have an empty stomach unless the barn is feeding a lot of hay, or the horse is one that just picks at its hay.
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This is basic 101 horse care to most people.
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In every barn I’ve been in, dumping even soaked hay pellets into a feed bucket would cause way more upset to the other horses than a flake or half a flake of hay…they’d get over it fast, but it’s definitely not less of a disruption to the routine than a handful of hay, in my experience.
My barn is VERY particular about always making sure horses get at least half a flake, if not a full flake, of hay 30 minutes or so before breakfast/dinner (whichever is the meal after they’ve been in the stall for a period of time). If they don’t finish it all before grain and turnout, it’ll still be there when they come back in later. Even the oldies that can’t chew hay very well get a scoop or two of well-soaked hay pellets then. I love that they do it actually, I feel like it’s good to have some forage in the stomach before any potential acidity from the meal.
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This thread has become a list of “everyone has their way, and everyone believes their way is the best way”.
As with most things when boarding out your horses, ask before doing anything that feels out of the normal routine. And definitely don’t go touching the barn hay or grain without permission!
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The last barn where I had Feronia, and the one before that did feed half a flake in the stall along with their grain. I did exactly that when I came early. Tacked her up out of the way of the barn staff.
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At our local racetrack everyone stabled there does this if they pay the woman who does morning feeding to do so. She comes in and feeds likely 95% of the horses there well before anyone else shows up. Rarely a problem, but everyone is pretty careful about making sure their horses can’t get out.
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This was never a common practice in horse keeping. Somehow we all managed to keep horses happy, healthy and free of many of the issues that are plaguing horse owners today on 2 appropriate sized hay meals per day??
It boggles my mind to think that you must feed your horse before riding and/ or keep them eating 24/7 because stomach acid will slosh around in there. No wonder so many horses are metabolic issues waiting to happen. So many horses who have 24/7 forage ( grass/ hay) are also continually treated for ulcers.
I routinely rode very early or late when my job demanded it. Never fed before or after.
I never have, but you have to do what works for your horsed that isn’t wrong at all ( quote below).
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To be fair, at least some of those horses probably had ulcers that no one knew about…
Many horses probably do fine riding on an empty stomach, but for ulcery horses, it is best practice to have some food in their belly. Know better, do better- lots of things we didn’t know in the past that we do now, we shouldn’t ignore the knowledge just because it was usually ok before (or the consequence wasn’t recognized).
Lucky you if you don’t have to worry about this with your(g) horse(s), one fewer thing to have anxiety over!
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Exactly. I think of it like this: if the horse chooses to stand around napping/swishing at flies and not eating, that’s their choice and likely their stomach isn’t hurting. But if I’m going to ask them to carry me around and force them to work, I’m going to hedge my bets with a little snack to lay down a mat and prevent acid splash. How I go about getting them that snack (buy a bag of chopped forage, hay cubes, toss them a flake of alfalfa, etc) will depend on the situation.
Plenty of horses in the “good old days” suffered for our ignorance as humans. It’s our job to do the best we can with the knowledge and resources at our disposal at any given moment.
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No offense intended but this is the same old pat answer I get anytime I bring up opposition to todays line of thinking on horse keeping.
Sure there is some new knowledge, some new things we have learned and some things that are beneficial but you can’t apply that to keeping all horses and you can’t throw out what has worked well in the past.
Managing horses is a real balancing act and very much individual to every horse. One size never fits all.
There again you are implying that our horses were suffering " back then" due to our ignorance when they clearly weren’t. Granted some were and some are suffering today despite all your new knowledge.
If my horse happily came out of his stall to be worked early and was a joy to ride and did all I asked him to do without resistance, why would I do anything different?
If you look hard enough you can back just about anything up with science. Doesn’t mean it is worth doing or even accurate. If science proved correct then horses with access to 24/7 forage would not have ulcers. They do. There is a flaw in there somewhere.
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Well… yeah… likely because we KNOW better now! Not to say that every new fad is a MUST - but if the science backs it up…
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I think that’s kind of the point here though- some horses need food in their stomach before being ridden. I specifically said 1. this is a recommendation particularly for ulcery horses, which is not all horses, and 2. great for the horses that don’t need it, but some individuals do.
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Thank you.
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Sweet Jesus. From a simple question about riding timing to all this debate over hay and semantics.
Everyone just remember this is COTH. You must be exactly precise about every single word in every single post and cover every single variable about every single thing before hitting the post button. And then certain posters will still argue with you ad nauseum and tear the whole thing apart.
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It’s not like discussions on Coth are new. It’s not like tangents on Coth are new.
Why the commentary. I mean you could have laid out all your points and then added, “And then, invariably, someone comes along to point out that this happens on many Coth threads, but they just have to point it out anyway.”
At least that would have been humorous 
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Isn’t discussions the whole point of a forum? To discuss stuff.
If no one discussed stuff it would be a very quiet place.
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Saving this for the gun threads when those of us wanting universal, ie same in every state, regulations and requirements, get schooled on using the “wrong” term .
Thanks.
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Apples and oranges.
Discussing weapons terminology on a weapons thread is appropriate.
it’s certainly helpful when wanting nationwide regulations if everyone uses the same terminology and uses the correct terminology 1) to intelligently discuss the issue, and 2) for consistency in application and enforcement.
This thread went way off the chain beating irrelevant pieces of minutiae to death . Over and over again. JMHO
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The flaw in your argument is that science doesn’t say that horses with access to 24/7 forage don’t get ulcers. 
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