I think grain and pelleted feeds serve specific purposes in specific situations. It may not be practical/affordable to access the best hay for a particular horse, or maybe you don’t want to have 10 different kinds of hay at a boarding facility. So you buy a good all-around hay and turn to feed to supplement where you have to fill the gaps. Just as with humans, food in its’ natural form is always best, but not always practical.
3 Likes
way more context is needed. Horses get excess iron in their diet just from their forage. That excess iron that was in the soil, that ended up (in part) in the forage, also blocked some degree of uptake of copper and zinc by that forage. But there ARE forages that have plenty of Cu and Zn even while they have more than the 400mg of Fe that the average horse needs
There are many areas of the US (and the world) where detrimentally excess iron isn’t an issue at all, and who have maybe only 2x what a horse needs (assuming he’s eating 2% of his weight in DM of that forage) and that also provide enough cu and zn
The biggest pushers of it being an enormous problem seem to be the ECIR and “forage-based nutrition” fanatics who claim that if you don’t have a ratio of 4:1:4:4 Fe:Cu:Zn:Mn, then you’re killing your horse. For starters, the only defined ratio is 1:4 cu:zn. For the vast majority of horses, who aren’t metabolic, if you get into the 10:1:4:3-5 range, and there’s enough of all those minerals, you’re fine. Fine.
The OP’s nutritionist seems to fall into this category, as there is nothing inherently wrong with the diet she’s feeding now. The change suggested isn’t extreme, it’s not having to make up a ton of calories, but it’s also not all needed, barring a real food sensitivity issue to, say, soy.
AND, her contention that soy, molasses, wheat, etc, are inherently “inflammatory” reeks of the rabid forage-based diet/anti-inflammatory crowd who doesn’t seem to understand anything about inflammation which, for the record, is actually required for life.
And yet, there are a ton of upper level barrel/reininng/cutting horses who eat some amount of cereal grains on a regular basis, usually oats, but sometimes corn or especially barley, either as part of a commercial feed mix, or a DIY with additional fortification. Oats in particular are relatively common to feed with straight alfalfa diets to help the high ca:phos ratio. A lot of upper level performance horses eat some actual cereal grains, including a ton competing at the FEI levels by way of some cereal grains in their fortified bagged feed.
7 Likes
Decades ago our horses trained and ran on alfalfa hay and oats, plus a salt brick to lick only.
Hematocrit count we tested ourselves and added Red Cell supplement as needed, maybe Calf Manna if a horse had a really hard race.
Our stable was leading stable two summer meets, plus one of our TB’s set a new track record and next race beat it again.
No matter how nice or well bred horses, they would not have been able to do that if we had a bad nutrition program, that worked fine.
1 Like
I think the idea stems from the Forage based AntiInflammatory /ECIR is because most commercial made bagged feeds contain ingredients such as soy, alfalfa , rice bran , corn, wheat , iron (not good for IR)etc are said to be inflammatory and therefore evil
Yes, I know where it stems, but it’s still not correct, not like they’re putting it out.
Soy doesn’t cause inflammation. Iron doesn’t cause inflammation. Alfalfa doesn’t cause inflammation. Wheat/corn/etc don’t cause inflammation, not without a whole lot more context.
There are too many IR horses happily eating ration balancers with soy. Or regular feeds with some wheat middlings. And yes, even getting some alfalfa.
It’s gotten ridiculous how much they’ve scared people into dropping bagged feeds and trying to DIY some random mix of things that are far less healthy than what they were feeding
5 Likes
One Purina scientist told me once that they work so very hard, run all kinds of studies and formulate very precise rations and then people add this and that randomly and give their addition praise for their animals looking and doing well, when on what they provided was the main reason they did good.
They also decry that they franchise their information to mills that don’t always do as good a job producing the feed as they should.
Inspecting mills is an ongoing job.
1 Like
O…MG, you have no idea how often I see someone take in a “poorly” horse, start feeding him properly and adding in a magic (read: expensive) supplement fed at 1-2oz, or some majik feed at 1c, and give all the credit to that majikal $$ product
2 Likes
