Re: Carbs -Water/comparison

[rides2far@juno.com (Angela C. McGhee)]

>So, where are the big guns? Doesn't anybody have some Grand Poobah 
>science to
>quote?

Yes Tom I do!  I slept on it and woke up with this on my mind.  Then I
wake up and see that I wrote my "You didn't get mad" post too early.  I
will give you some leeway, considering that Heidi, Joe, Sarah and I have
been fighting as a tag team, whereas you've been wrestling the keyboard
without a break.

You say it's better for our horses to get their energy with grain...Heidi
wants her horse to eat 40 lbs of hay.

I just recalled a study I read about a few years back.  They had taken a
dozen ponies and fed 1/2 the group a high grain diet, and 1/2 the group a
mostly hay diet...the results?  The group that ate more hay carried FAR
MORE WATER!!  

Now, in the endurance horse this is GOOD, in the race horse this is BAD.

I remember when we would send horses to be trained for the track and my
dad would come in and say, "He's starting to tuck".  Ooooh that was
exciting. (Contrast that with Courtney Hart's recommendation that a good
endurance horse should be larger in the flank than the girth.)

 I loved going to the track and seeing the horses all tucked up like
grayhounds.  Of course, the tuck was achieved by putting horses on fairly
high grained diets, then just giving them a little flake of alfalfa for
their roughage; then of course the exercise.  The fact is, water in the
gut is just dead weight to a racehorse.  That's why they take away their
hay on raceday and their water an hour or so before the race.

Contrast that with the endurance horse that we want hydrated up like a
camel.  Endurance horses are in far greater danger of running out of
water than they are of running out of energy.  Don't know where that puts
the "Fats burn on the flame of Carbos"  Does the water snuff the flame
out for you?  :-)

Some things just aren't of equal importance in the two sports.  To a
racehorse, big bone is big weight, that's why they've bred it out of
them.  Big feet means big weight on the end of a pole (bigger weight) so
they bred it out.  Big gut means too much water, so you emptied it. 
Perhaps that is why Heidi has her hindgut fixation.  People who go on
long trips should always carry water!

Angie 


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