That’s what I thought you were asking. 
It’s a convenience thing, it’s quite obnoxious with some horses to clean their stall if you leave the hay loose in there they don’t eat it and mash it up all over their stall, not so bad if you have straw, but it’s a huge PITA if you have shavings.
All our horses get their hay on the ground except for 2 who for whatever reason prefer to eat it out of the net.
To go back to what DaHoss said… an equine dentist I used to use told me years ago that when the horse’s head is lowered, the teeth are in proper alignment to chew (since nature designed them to be grazers). When you feed them out of a high bucket, or a high hay net, you’re basically making them chew at an unnatural angle, which can cause more teeth problems than would normally occur. To that end, I’ve always tried to keep feed buckets, hay keepers of whatever kind, etc, at as low a setting as possible that I know the horse won’t tear up, trash the food or hay around, get a foot caught in it, etc.
[QUOTE=Gnalli;5795582]
Thanks Calamber. That makes sense.[/QUOTE]
No problem. I hated doing it at barns where they did, it was heavy, nasty work when it was hot. Plus I did not like breathing in the hay chaff + dust and hated the thought of what I was doing to the horses because of someone’s belief in time saving (pretty fallacious too). I never lasted long at those barns. I think it is insane to do that to horses, the teeth thing aside, which, while interesting, is an order of magnitude of lesser importance than the problem you get with them inhaling all of that all of the time. Pretty stupid when you think about it for both of those reasons.
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