[QUOTE=Brian;8547133]
If I recall correctly, the alfalfa your horse is on is a pellet, is it not? About 14 lbs per day if memory serves me correctly. I don’t know your reasoning for this, but in most cases, the primary cause for supplementing with alfalfa pellets is to compensate for sub par hay. If your timothy/alfalfa/orchard blend was of high enough quality, there shouldn’t have been a need to supplement almost 50% of the forage intake with pellets. That’s precisely my point regarding building a diet around a quality forage. The diet you have your horse on may be based upon an all forage diet, but that’s not the same as being based upon a quality forage diet.
A horse chewing 14 lbs of alfalfa pellets is not going to produce the same amount of saliva as it would if it were chewing 14 lbs of high quality long stem alfalfa. Some people soak alfalfa pellets to make a mash. How many times do you think the horse will chew a mash before it swallows? I think sometimes, the importance of saliva production and what it does in the digestive process in the horse is grossly underestimated by horse owners. IMO, that could be the very difference between needing a gut supplement or not.
Sorry, I just don’t believe it makes sense to put together a feed program for a horse that requires a supplement to be added to prevent or fix a problem potentially caused by the feed program itself.
I’d be very interested in reading the scientific studies that support GUT’s claims.[/QUOTE]
Here’s the rundown. My horse doesn’t do well on a grain based diet but refuses to eat pure alfalfa hay. Not to mention 40lb bales of alfalfa cost upwards of $30 here in Florida. That would last my horse 2 days if he’s lucky. Not cost effective, either. I replaced his grain diet with alfalfa pellets, NOT soaked. The blended hay he eats is offered in the amount that he comfortably consumes in a day. Always has some left. If i just left him to eat the hay, he wouldn’t eat enough, and would lose weight. The alfalfa pellets provide the extra calories he requires.
I don’t see what’s confusing about that? He’s still on a forage based diet, whether you consider alfalfa pellets forage or not, they’re not a grain. I do realize they’re not long stem forage and I’m not saying they are. Only that they provide extra calories that he refuses to eat in pure hay form. A multivitamin to balance what he’s not getting from the blend of hay that he eats.
Where’s the confusion? It’s still a very stomach supportive diet. Why do you come on every post and start out so snarky? No one is disagreeing that forage based diets (which is all you seem to care to offer to anyone here ever) are the best way to go. Why then do you feel the need to knock other things which work for certain horses? They aren’t one size feeds all. I know a terrible ulcer horse who eats 32 pounds of pure high quality alfalfa out west daily and nothing else. He still has ulcers. He still requires treatment. He still receives a supplement for his stomach. Explain how his forage based diet isn’t working? Because it isn’t “high quality”? That’s not a reason when the hay is great. I’m not saying my hay is the best, however I do happen to know for a fact that it’s not hurting my horse and not the root cause of ulcers or stomach upset.
Please do a bit more research on ulcers before blasting off that if all horses were forage based, they wouldn’t require supplementation, omeprazole, etc. Some horses are managed poorly in their past and it sets them up for a lifetime of stomach issues no matter how well they’re supported the rest of their lives (IE being OTTBS). Not in ALL cases, of course, but they sure do exist.
I stand by the supplements that work for me and my horse. GUT has been great, Smart Digest Ultra has been a godsend for my horse’s hind gut. Actiflex gives a notable difference in my horse’s performance and his joints. You can’t argue with something that we as horse owners experience day in and day out. You take my horse off any one of those three supplements, and he’s nowhere near the same animal. Try to explain to me how my horse’s diet causes that. For someone who totes around claiming to know so much about a forage diet, you sure are confused and misinformed about some things. Are you stating that everyone should get hay from the most nutrient dense fields in america so that no one has to supplement anything? Good luck telling that to folks like myself in Florida, where nothing grows but coastal type grasses. We have to import our hay from other states. And even then, we can’t be sure that our hay, as pretty as it may be, is going to fill in all our horse’s requirements. Yes, we test it. But we still may find that we need to add something to the diet. Selenium…Vitamin E…seriously, you’re saying if everyone is feeding a good hay, no one should need ANY supplement?? Why is it different for ulcers? Some horses, despite the best diet, are still way stressed. It’s not all about the diet. I just hate misinformation being spread around.
