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RE: [RC] [SPAM] [RC] Pounds of hay - heidiIf we're talking about hay only (not cubes or pellets) and if the hay does indeed have 0.75% chloride, at the lowest sweating rates if they're never going longer than 4 hours between eating and are always eating at least 8 pounds of hay for every hour riding, you're probably covered. If eating less than that, or sweating heavier, you go into the negative zone and have to play catch up. Let's look at two different 50-mile ride scenarios--the slow ride and the fast ride. If one takes the maximum elapsed time for a ride (which is difficult to do on most horses, on most courses), and one has 2 hours out for holds, one can subdivide the ride into roughly four 2.5 hour segments. So even on the slow ride, the horse is only going 2.5 hours between "meals." Except for extreme weather, this will likely be a minimal sweating scenario, since the horse is not producing as much excess heat as the horse going faster (although he also isn't generating as much external cooling, due to his slower speed). Assume that the first and third checks are half an hour, and that the middle check is an hour. He may be a bit shy of his eating requirements at 1 and 3, but if he is a good eater, he will make up for it at 2. The worst offender here is vetting procedure that cuts into the horse's eating time--and the wise rider brings a flake of hay into the vet line! This horse is likely also eating natural forages along the trail, as he isn't progressing very fast. Also, in many of our desert areas, the dry native grasses tend to be high in e-lyte concentration relative to hay. Let's make the "fast" scenario a 4-hour 50, just to make the math easy. The horse will be sweating more, but he is only ONE HOUR between meals! Even if he is sweating fairly copiously, he is quickly back to a source of feed, and if he eats well, will tend to stay on the curve fairly well. Most of us are riding somewhere between these two extremes, but what you "lose" in increased time between meals you "gain" in working less hard and in being able to "snack" more enroute. This does underscore the importance of forage as the primary feed source, though... There's been a lot of discussion about the best way to feeding during a ride, but not much along the lines of actually checking to back it up. It would be very interesting to see how different feeding practices influence them metabolically. I think we already get a pretty good look at this on the trail--the voracious consumers of forage tend to be the horses who need little or no e-lyte supplementation, while those who don't eat well need more help. Some of that falls under "feeding practices"--but some falls under how we raise our horses in the first place, and whether they learn (and adapt) as youngsters to being forage eaters, or whether they are "taught" away from that natural tendency by more "convenient" modern feeding practices. Heidi =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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