sascha:
My 2 cents from learning to deal with a similar horse.
Sucralfate until she stops being a picky eater, then use whenever anything is stressful.
Unlimited alfalfa. Don’t bother with grass hay if you can avoid it. She doesn’t need to be kept busy, she needs good quality forage that she will actually eat!
Canola oil (I feed 2 cups in winter and 1-1.5 in summer when she’s on pasture all day) I fed 3 cups a day when she needed weight put on. 1-2 cups a day is maintenance now that she is in good flesh. My horse is maybe 1150lbs with fairly heavy muscling for her fine frame. She needs a ton of supplemental calories!
Ration balancer weighed to the appropriate amount for the hay she is eating (weigh your hay so you know what percentage of her body weight she will eat in a day) AND to the amount appropriate for your geographical location/geographical origin of your hay. If your feed company’s nutritionist can’t help you do the math on that or doesn’t know why, find a new feed co.
Find a daily pro/pre-biotic and a good ‘ulcer’ supplement (I like Biotic 8 and Visceral) to keep her happy.
One thing I did with my mare was to take away the stress of feeding her when she had other things on her mind. Yours may be less fussy than you think and might need to have her daytime ‘grain’ feeds cut drastically. Mine prefers to eat late in the evening when the barn has settled and she has nothing else to do.
Good luck!
This sounds just like Mojito. She doesn’t like to eat her grain in the morning, I think she’s too anxious to be turned out. I feed her the majority of her grain at night, so she has time to eat it. Thank you for the tips.
