One of the horses in our barn gets hot as a firecracker off Purina Strategy. I’ve heard of others talk about how this grain or that grain makes their horses hot. This is the first time it has ever happened to me personally. Has anyone else had this happen off this particular grain?
Yeah, I don’t think it’s that uncommon. The NSC is pretty high, IIRC?
It turned my horse straight crazy. He was way more aggressive than normal and really spooky. He also lost weight on it despite eating a ton of it.
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I had the same experience with my TB. He was hot and not doing great weight-wise. Behind my back, the trainer told the barn manager to up him to 12 pounds a day. A week later, the day before leaving for a clinic, I found out about it. He was a powder keg for the dressage and the clinician refused to let me ride him for the jumping. The clinician told my trainer SHE should ride him. She refused. The clinician (Olympic rider who I got the horse from) ended up taking him cross-country.
The NSC of Strategy has come down from what it used to be (into the 20s iirc) and is, I think, 18% now. So it’s on the higher side of what I’d consider ok to feed (my limit is 20) but not terribly high.
But it is a feed that seems to have 2 very different results - horses either do very well, or terribly (look or act awful). There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, and I’ve never been able to figure out why.
But that either-or has been very consistent over the 10+ years I’ve paid attention.
I used to feed it. It turned my mare in to a raging nutcase under saddle and she eventually went to bucking and humping around. Tried a couple different feeds with the same results. It turned out that she just goes nuts on feed with corn in it.
Now I custom blend a feed for her without corn and she’s doing beautifully on it (50% alfalfa pellets, 25% oats, 13.5% flax seed, and 13.5% BOSS). I also give her a fly supplement and multivitamin to cover my bases nutritionally. She gets about 3.5lbs per day with a splash of oil mixed in to it to keep any dust from the oats down. Her hooves and coat are extremely healthy, she’s in heavy work and maintaining weight nicely (grass pasture and 24/7 coastal round bale as well). She’s not the easiest keeper around either, took me a long time to find the right mix for her and this blows everything out of the water.
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Thank you for your input. We turned the horse out for 2 weeks and the brain has come back. We have 18 horses here and this was the only one it happened to. It was clear it was the feed. Nothing else had changed. Horse is now back to normal and on Blue Seal again.
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My horse wasn’t on that specific Purina feed, but one of their supplement feeds for muscles building and it made him super hot. He was only on a cup 2x. Hes completely off. Our guys get CarbCare from Southern States and all the hot heads are happily not with this grain!
