Health & Care · #nutrition

Health & Care guides tagged “nutrition” from the Apex Equine resource center.

• Forage first: why hay is the most important thing in the feed room — Most feed-room problems start with the scoop instead of the hay. A horse is built to graze sixteen hours a day, and everything else you feed is a footnote to that.
• Body condition scoring: learning to see what your hands feel — A winter coat hides everything and a long mane forgives a cresty neck. The only honest way to judge weight is with your hands, on a 1-to-9 scale, in the same six places every time.
• Reading a feed tag: choosing the right concentrate — The front of the bag is marketing. The guaranteed analysis and the ingredient list on the back tell you what you're actually buying — and whether your horse needs it at all.
• Does your horse actually need that supplement? — The American supplement aisle is a multi-billion-dollar business built on owner guilt. Some products earn their place; most are expensive insurance against problems your horse doesn't have.
• The easy keeper's diet: managing the horse who lives on air — Some horses get fat looking at a pasture. Managing them isn't cruelty — it's the kindest thing you can do, because the alternative is laminitis.
• Putting weight on the hard keeper safely — Before you dump in more grain, rule out the reasons a horse can't hold weight. Then add calories the way the gut can handle them — slowly, and mostly from fat and fiber.
• Water and electrolytes: the cheapest health insurance you've got — A horse can go off feed for a day and recover. Go short on water and you're looking at impaction colic. Salt and clean water do more for health than most of what's in the supplement cabinet.
• Feeding the laminitis-prone horse — For a metabolic horse, sugar in the diet isn't a comfort — it's a trigger. Feeding to keep the feet attached means controlling carbohydrates with a discipline most barns find uncomfortable.
• Feeding the pregnant and nursing mare — A broodmare's diet barely changes for most of pregnancy, then her needs explode after she foals. Get the timing wrong and you under-feed when it matters most.