Does beet pulp count towards the 5 lb limit per meal?
1 Like
i have not found anything that will not eat Teff hay
1 Like
Timothy hay has to be cut early enough so it doesn’t continue growing. The longer you wait to cut it the stemmier it gets. My gelding was 28 when I put him down in 2022. His teeth were in pretty good shape, but he needed softer hay. He wouldn’t eat the stems. We were able to pick out softer bales. They are relatively easy to pick out of a pile. Softer bales tend to be greener and the stems are easy to spot. Alfalfa doesn’t grow here. Timothy/clover mix is the basic crop.
Here in Maine first cut usually happens in early to mid June. Weather dictates if you can cut earlier in the month. You need 3 sunny days to cut, dry and bale. The later in June you do first cut the stemmier the hay will be. This year was so wet in June that first cut didn’t start until early July. The hay actuallly was pretty good because there weren’t enough sunny days to make it grow. I had never seen that before in the 21 years I owned my horse.
Quidding is a pain response, according to my horse’s dentist. They quit chewing and spit it out. My horse had a gap - diastema - between a few lower molars and the gum. Thoroughly chewed hay would get caught. From time to time it would build up into a wad. Sometimes he would drop a wad of it. You could see how well chewed it was. One day we were walking and he found one he had dropped a day earlier. He snatched it up, finished chewing and was happy.
Another boarder was up my ass for 4 days claiming my horse was quidding. He wasn’t. He saw the dentist every 6 months. I prefer a dentist to a vet because the dentist sees a lot of conditions that a vet doesn’t simply because the dentist does teeth 100% of the time. Our dentist worked with quite a few of the local vets.
My vet recommended TC Senior Gold. As mentioned above more calories and my old lady likes it as much as her TCS. When I needed to stabilize her weight I switched her which helped. I then switched to straight alfalfa hay which really packed weight on her (she had gotten meh about her nice, to my eyes, OG/A mix hay.
