Horse STILL losing weight

[Hermein]

My dear old WB continues to drop weight. He has a good appetite, plenty of energy, teeth checked, floated yearly, wormed regularly, 12+ hours of turnout with his pals, CBC was normal, soaked feed 3 times a day, plus 20 lbs of alfalfa hay, and I can still count his ribs from 30ft. He’s retired, so no regular work.

He was colicking often earlier this year. I added additional salt, pre/pro biotics and about a daily ounce of psyllium to his diet, which seems to have solved the colic problem.

What’s next?

[IndyEquestrian]

I have a 30 year old 17.2 hh warmblood gelding, and the older he gets, the more support he needs. He gets regular vet visits, dentist, farrier etc. . . and has been worked up twice for weight loss with no significant findings, and no real suggestions, other than “let’s give him more calories.”

He now gets (3 times daily, all soaked);
4 lbs TC Senior
1/2 lb Renew Gold
1 lb alfalfa pellets
2 oz CocoSoya Oil
GUT (Uckele)

Other Supplements (once daily)
Electrolytes (he’s a sweater and it’s hot!)
Senior Joint Supplement (Uckele)
Devils Claw Plus (Uckele)

He is on free choice hay and grass all day everyday (he can come and go from the barn as he pleases), and gets alfalfa twice daily (just a flake to make him feel special, he ends up leaving and eating grass half the time).

All of this and he looks pretty good. I wish he had a top line, but he’s 30. I also wish he weren’t sun bleached, but he likes to be outside, even though there are fans and hay in his stall. It takes a lot, and he will probably never be as heavy as I like, but our vet has re-assured me multiple times, that as they get older, being a little thinner is okay. Though, admittedly, most of mine are usually on diets.

Hope this helps!

[Flash44]

Sorry to hear that! How much soaked feed is he getting a day and what are you feeding? What about adding fat?

[LauraKY]

When was he last dewormed and with what?

[MustangSavvy]

Has he been checked for ulcers?

[candyappy]

How old is he? Like any aged animal ( or some people for that matter) when you get way up there in years, some are just going to lose weight despite the best food available and a good appetite. Is he eating all that alfalfa or is that what is offered to him?

[merrygoround]

When they get old, some of these horses intestinal tracts just don’t absorb nutrients as they did when they were younger. You can probably think of increasing his Senior feed, and check his field to see if he is quidding grass. They still like to munch hay, even if they end up spitting it out in quids.

How old is he?

[shea_smom]

Check for hind gut ulcers by doing the test for blood in the manure. My 33 year old looks terrible now. He eats grain but not much else.

[ReSomething]

Snort is 29 and gets almost precisely Indy’s diet, 10 lbs fed at night in one sitting, this is not the best method, the three times per day is, but we have herd bound issues etc. He doesn’t like soaked foods and right now is skipping the alfalfa cubes, but has a good layer of fat over the ribs, not such a good topline.

Shortly I should be taking in a sample for a fecal as he had a high count this Spring an I may want to get a extra deworming in.

He has Cushing’s and that affects his protein metabolism, so this winter he had a sheath the size of a grapefruit and edema, which had to be moved with exercise.
Age in itself does change things. Not so badly that all old horses have to look like crap, but it’s why they do get skinny and poor looking if weren’t careful.

[newhorsemommy]

It wouldn’t hurt to test him for Cushing’s.

[Hermein]

Two other things to run by you all: It has been terribly, terribly hot here this spring/summer–more triple digit days than not, and the “nots” have been in the 90s. When the vet was out in April, she checked his teeth, said he didn’t need a float, but we noticed two deep scratches on the bottom of his tongue and one on the inside of his jaw. I thought these probably came from grazing too close to the milk thistle plants that are spreading over from the neighbor’s field. I haven’t looked again, having assumed the scratches would heal. At the time, she also okayed a once-a-week worming with ivermectrin. (I was whining about his weight loss then, too.)

Watching him eat his porridge last night, I remembered that I hadn’t mentioned that he’s spilling the pellets out the front of his mouth right after he takes a bite.

If this further info gives anyone an idea of why my boy is getting skinnier, I’d appreciate reading it.

Thanks.

PS–He’s 28, approaching 29.

[FatCatFarm]

Oil - 1 cup to 1.5 cups per feedings and it doesn’t have to be expensive oil either. Canola at the discount grocery is fine. Probably will help his digestion a bit too. Before I started watering everyone’s ration down to make it a mash, I thought oil was just too messy to deal with, but with mixing it into feed with water, it’s really no big deal and it does make a difference. 1 cup is about 2000/2500 calories. Worth a shot.

Also, you never said how much soaked feed he is getting? My hard keeping TB broodmare is getting 10lbs of feed soaked with 3 cups of beet pulp, a cup of BOSS and a cup of oil twice a day, plus plenty of pasture and and 20lbs of mixed grass hay. This is double of what she was getting until she hit late pregnancy and it is making a difference.

Finally, is he quidding the alfalfa or is he still able to chew it well. If he’s having trouble eating his hay, it may be time to substitute soaked alfalfa cubes to make it easier.

[Cashela]

The barn I work at has been feeding Purina Impact Hay Stretcher to their older horses (25+) and I have to say it has put weight on them as well as a nice shine.

[SoonieOTTB]

when I was having trouble with my old-ish mare last summer (quit sweating and dropped weight like crazy), I double dosed her with Strongid, and that seemed to work better than ivermectin. ivermectin won’t do tapes.

you can get 5 gal of soy oil at costco for ~$25.

I also have much better luck with Nutrena boost vs regular rice bran, if he won’t eat oil.

Also - I was giving electrolytes because that’s part of the non-sweating protocol, but she wasn’t finishing her dinner b/c she didn’t like them. Is he finishing his meals - or is he not appreciative of the extra salt? Maybe a block instead of adding it into his meals?

[ReSomething]

Well, Snort looked horrible in 2013 and he would eat about half his meals and leave the rest so DH and I were fighting over that as well, DH being of the opinion that I was feeding him too much because he wasn’t eating it all even as he was getting to quite the racing fit look.
We’d changed his diet in 2012 to TC Sr, which he liked, but it wasn’t some miracle cure. They said start with 5 lbs and that wasn’t nearly enough, he lost weight and it was tough to figure how much he really needed.
Yes, he hated the heat. He didn’t want to eat in the morning if he could be out. We’d already tried keeping him at my trainer’s and couldn’t find a routine that just let him sit back and eat, there was always something else to look at or worry about. We put him on Vita Calm.
He hated his Pergolide on top of his TC Sr., so much that he’d leave quite a bit of it rather than eat it.
I finally made up a couple of muck buckets and put his entire ration for the day in those muck buckets around the pen when we put him up in the cool of the evening. We’re talking about 9 pounds of TC Sr and a half a cup of flaxseed oil blend and another couple of pounds of lightly soaked cubes, plus about a half a bale of hay. He would spend all night eating that, going from muck bucket to muck bucket, and I’d go out there with the syringe of Pergolide and dose him, get it over with, and we got the weight on slowly. We have half wall stalls now, smaller than the pen, and my DH doesn’t like the muck bucket method, he wants the corner feeders, so corner feeders it is although IMO we don’t get efficient digestive use of the feed by having him snuffle it down in one go.
I keep a “rescue horse” album and use a tape to keep from losing perspective.
He responds well to being bathed – yesterday we had showers and it was HOT and muggy afterward, and there he was, soaked with sweat on his belly and hot and wet on his back so I got out the hose and just sprayed him with cold hose water, and scratched his tummy, and then he turned around and I did the other side, and he almost let me bathe his face.
So, IMO for the old guys it isn’t just calories in, calories out, especially if yours has had colic issues he’s probably not digesting as well and you need to weight tape him and take pics and see where he’s remodeling – Snort right now is remodeled to reflect his Cushing’s, hard crest, fat pads over the ribs but not much of a topline at all, so “ribs” can mean not much or a lot, they have to be taken as part of a whole.

[Chief2]

I would also suggest rechecking the formulation of your horse’s feed. A friend of mine experienced some of this last winter with her 25 year old horse. She had been feeding the same decent senior product for years, when he then began to slide in weight. Turns out, the company took the original product for seniors, relabeled it for performance horses, and was marketing a different ingredient content for seniors in an extruded pellet form that looked the same as before, but had 50 percent less fat and fiber in it. They had left the bottom tag on the bag blank so the average consumer would not notice the difference. Once she began searching online, she found the difference, switched to the performance product, and the horse made a come back. Had she not thought to check on this, she would have been into a vet odyssey costing hundreds of dollars. It pays to keep an eye on your feed manufacturer. Also, if he is dropping feed out of the front of his mouth, either the scratches or cuts in his mouth are still bothering him, or it may be time for a dental recheck. Something in there sounds out of whack.

FWIW, I use Triple Crown Senior on my oldsters, with Blue Seal Haystretcher, in a 50:50 mix, three or four times a day, and add Ration Plus to the feed once a day. It seems to help keep the weight on.