Appetite at holds

[Sarah Ralston <ralston@AESOP.RUTGERS.EDU>]

John and Sue wrote: 
The horses that "quit" were ravenous at the later holds and were even given
the 
opportunity to eat out on the trail by the crews.  My horse, who did 
not quit, would stop by the trucks and browse, but was more 
interested in continuing.  Those horses were not.  Didn't even pick 
their heads up when we left them.

This actually has given me another theory. I did my PhD work on
factors that control appetite in horses-an endless question,
that one! But what we did find was that blood glucose seemed to correlate
with appetite-the lower it was, the more the horses wanted to eat. Now the
blood glucose
of the forage fed horses doesn't move around much. If you gave carb charge
at one check
and the horse was going low on glucose (the rebound effect that's been
discussed already) by the
next, it might translate into a ravenous appetite. If the horses ate more
oats/sweet than usual
they might have had a higher insulin peak than usual, resulting in a
glucose overshoot, stimulating
the ravenous appetite. Purely conjecture on my part, but makes sense based
on what 
little I do know about appetite control in these beasties. Fling does eat
concentrates well at
holds either but has surprised me on a couple of occasions. I'll have to
look back at might 
notes as to what I did differently. Thinking about it, one of the times was
when I was playing 
around with pushing the carbos to her (the infamous crash followed).
She also usually tries to steal every one else's hay (her's is nevergood
enough-it's again
very embarassing!).

Just a funny aside story: regarding maintaining weight and breed differences:
 In the work on appetite control 
we were using ponies adapted to free choice pelleted feed (yes, Tom, no
long hay, but it was 
an alfalfa based pellet). They were amazingly accurate at maintaining a
given weight 
once adapted-but the weight they maintained way just a hair short of
morbidly obese!
I got the bright idea I wanted to what effect exercise had-one of my
colleagues
had a bunch of morgans he was going to use in a treadmill study and I
convinced hi
to let me get them on free choice pellets and see if they ate more when
exercised. I was 
incredibly naive. Those darn morgans ate everything I gave them-never did
get to free choice.
The got so fat that they couldn't fit on the treadmill!! Needless to say I
got kicked off
the project!

Sarah and Fling


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