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Re: [RC] teaching a horse to drink??? - Chris PausWell, first off, congratulations to you for making a good decision. You did what is right for your horse, even if it caused you disappointment. There could be lots of factors involved. I think endurance riding can be very emotional for horses. They want to run with the herd.They pick up the excitement and electricity of the start. My experience campaigner will not eat or drink much at all on the first loop. By the second loop he's feeling thirsty and will drink at every opportunity and eat grass at every meadow. One thing I see is too much alfalfa. If you read SusanG's website you'll see that you are really overloading the system with protein. You want to fill her with lots of roughage.. this is where good grass hay and beet pulp come in. I teach distance riding and can always tell which of my students feed a lot of alfalfa.. the horse has sticky foamy lather instead of clear sweat. This isn't as effective for cooling. The horses also seem to be a little more on edge. A few years ago, a study was done on race horses and alfalfa. They found out that the horses with high alfalfa diets actually ran slower than the ones with a traditional race horse diet of grass hay and oats. A little alfalfa is a good thing. It adds calcium to the diet and that's an important element when the horse is sweating and working. But it's one of those things that is not good when overdone. electrolytes should not cause a horse to stop drinking. It should encourage the horse to drink. When I got started in this sport, my horse refused to drink.. I started adding powdered gatorade to his water. It's not as good as regular equine electrolytes, but he did drink the water which was important. I think you are on the right track, but just need to tweak your program a little. Don't overfeed before a ride. I don't really do much different before ride day except increase the beet pulp and add some fastrack to the mix. About a week before, I start feeding my horse an handful of fastrack each day. That helps keep the gut working well and digesting properly. You might see if you can find a ride manager who wants a "drag" or safety rider so you can take your horse to a ride, ride behind all the others, and just get her used to the activity and excitement of ride camp. Usually CTRs use drag riders more than endurance rides, but I've been on endurance rides where the manager had them... Take your horse on overnight campouts without competition. Just get her used to the whole process of eating sleeping and drinking in a strange place. Hope this information helps! chris --- Elkenchild@xxxxxxx wrote: My mare and I tried our first 25 this weekend, but quit after the first loop, to my dissapointment. She had pulled off feed and water in the morning, and showed visual gut cramping at VC. Though she only scored a B, the vet said she needed to drink, and when she continued to refuse feed and water I made an executive decision and scratched! Here are the factor I've taken into consideration: she was over-excited about first ridecamp experience, in-season, I fed her too much in the two days before the event, she had been eating only the alfalfa out of our hay/alfalafa mix (because I had been giving her so much hay), the electrolytes put her off water (does that happen)? Any feedback would be great, and how can I teach her to drink strange water in a strange place, if it's even possible! Thanks for the advice. We will be trying again in a month or two! Laura "Not all who wander are lost." (jrr tolkien) ===== "A good horse makes short miles," George Eliot Chris and Star BayRab Acres http://pages.prodigy.net/paus ============================================================ You don't have to be a 100-mile rider or a multi-day rider to be an endurance rider, but if you want to experience the finest challenges our sport has to offer, you need to do both of those. ~ Joe Long ridecamp.net information: http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/ ============================================================
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