I very carefully select my hay - I buy from farmers that do hay analysis and try to always use the same suppliers to keep as much the same as I can.
I wish she could be on pasture but it’s now November in Pennsylvania and there’s pretty much nothing left.
She eats all of the alfalfa I give her and probably 15lb of the orchard grass. She has access to more if she wanted it, I never leave her without hay in front of her.
OP, I can speak to this ^
my lease is this way - he loses all muscle and looks pretty crappy overall. when he was in consistent work, on good feed and turnout and on cocosoya oil as a supplement, he was apparently the happiest and best looking that he had ever looked.
I had a horse come into my care very underweight and not gaining weight with a very calorie-dense diet. We were tracking her weight with a weight tape and had not seen any weight gain after a couple months. I was told the horse didn’t have a history of ulcers, but I got the impression nobody ever checked.
On the lunge line I could see that she was not moving well so we fixed her hoof angles, put her on arthritis medication, and put her on ulcer meds for three months (without scoping first). About two months into the ulcer treatment, her personality settled suddenly and she started gaining weight.
I did sort of shoot in the dark on this one because the owner gave me permission to work on the horse, but was not wanting to pay or tests, etc. Her hoof angles were really off and I think that contributed to the arthritis. In this case, 8 think the mare had a lot of persistent moderate discomfort that was preventing weight gain. After we resolved all that, it was about 3 months before she was up to a healthy weight.
My understanding is that you have to fast a horse before scoping for ulcers, and that seems unnecessarily stressful to me. My vet advises to treat as if they have ulcers and see what happens. If they settle down and/or hold weight after treatment, then you can assume they had ulcers. This worked for us.
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But what are you treating with? Use the wrong medication for the type of ulcers present, and you can convince yourself it’s not ulcers when you don’t see results
In other words, treatment can provide a false negative.
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