Re: RC: Re: Reply to Sarah's post

["Frank Mechelhoff" <fmechelh@c-s-k.de>]

Hey Heather,
nice to find some more Europeans here in RC ;-)

Most of us (me2) use fat to a limited extend, as an additional source of energy,
and to reduce one of the biggest problem occurring on high-grain-diets: too much
overall protein.  I use sunflower-oil, others use corn-oil, or even animal-fat.
It's not my conviction it does any good for itself, but I see the advantage that
0,3 litre oil has the energy as the 6-fold volume of  oats - and I feed some
oats too.
In the natural ration of the horse fat occurs only in a very limited form - if
any! Fat-rich types of grain comsists at max. 20% fat. Most horses don't even
like fat to eat, and some really hate it  - there will be a reason for it...
The main reason against feeding fat seems to be that big amounts of fat in the
bowel reduces digestion of fibre, the natural energy source of the horse, and
therefore aggrevate the horses overall body condition (usually the opposite what
shall be reached). Another important one, in the athlete, is that fats acts as
pro-oxidants, and will produce free radicals that destroy cells and inhibit
healing, which must be balanced with feeding more Vit.E and Selenium. You can
easily do too much of a good thing!

I well know that "high-fat-diets" were announced for more than one decade for
endurance and other high performance horses. Time enough to find out. I
personally know absolute NO rider who uses, or had used fat as a primary energy
source with success. I would like to hear if ANY Ridecamper had feed a
"high-fat-diet" (say, more than 1 litre ~ 2 pds per day) over some periods of
time with success - that means, was happy with overall condition and performance
of the horse. I doubt. If such person exists, I would be really interested to
know the type and amounts of fat as well as the amount of other nutrients, how
the basic feeding is and what time it takes get the horse used to this diet.
Maybe then I'll give one more try. At the moment, "high-fat" seems to be a
dead-horse to me. A very dead one.


regards
Frank Mechelhoff
Schmitten, Germany
- & the Taunus mountain ponies (Ligeira and Natajy) -





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