RE: [RC] Hay to keep warm - Susan E. Garlinghouse, DVM
Susan, you suggest feeding extra protein.
Because I have one horse in my herd that founders (mostly because he's grossly
overweight), I feed oats. We do up the oat ration by a scoop a day for
warmth. I've got excellent pasture so nutritionally, the herd is covered.
Would you suggest feeding alfalfa (probably in
pellet form; I don't want to dwindle my stock of hay...it's for endurance
rides) or should I do a high-protein grain during the cold winter months?
What is high protein? 14%? 25%? What is too much protein?
Thanks!
Good grief, my hair is turning white as we
speak. If you have a horse that is both prone to founder AND grossly
overweight, then he shouldn’t be getting oats or any concentrates
whatsoever, regardless of temperature. NONE, NADA, ZERO. Although
lower in starch than corn or barley, it’s still a high source of starch,
and therefore absolutely, completely and totally verboten for your guy.
He shouldn’t so much as see a bag of oats as it’s carried past him
for the rest of his life. Making myself really, really clear here, right?
Totally aside from the starch issue, oats does extremely little
to help warm them up during cold weather---it’s high in starch, which is
easily digested with very little waste heat to stoke the furnace, and although
higher in fiber than other grains, it’s still not even in the ballpark
with forage. Five pounds of alfalfa (which varies in protein usually
between 16 – 25%) is going to do a lot more for heat production than
virtually any amount of oats---and even that may not be necessary if your
pasture is high quality. If there’s quality pasture available
throughout the winter, then it’s not cold enough in your area for
temperature to even be an issue. The only thing any grain is going to do
towards maintaining core temperature is by supplying extra calories that will
eventually contribute to an extra layer of insulating fat somewhere down the
road.
If feeding a concentrate is the best option in a particular
situation, and alfalfa for some reason isn’t readily available, then a
good choice would be a balanced broodmare pellets, usually somewhere between
16-25% crude protein with soybean meal listed in the first few ingredients on
the ingredient label. But because concentrates, even a high protein
concentrate, is still going to be digested much more quickly than a
forage-based protein source, its not going to do nearly as good a job as a
fermentable, high fiber flake of hay trucking its way slowly through the hindgut.
