Feed Your Horse Like a Horse

Twenty years ago, feeding was one of the subjects I shouted about most. And when I say shouted, I mean shouted.

Those who've known EquiNatural for a very long time may remember the original Feed Your Horse Healthy section of this website – pages and pages about forage, fibre, feed bags and virtually everything else that might conceivably find its way into a horse's feed bowl.

I had opinions on all of it. Strong ones. There was a reason, though.

Back in 2005/6 I took my horses barefoot. By sheer googling luck I stumbled onto the UKNHCP forum, run by Nic Barker of Rockley Farm; not because I was setting out to discover some grand new philosophy of horse health, but because one of my horses had such desperately poor-quality hooves that we were rapidly running out of options.

And oh my, did that forum send me down a rabbit hole. It started with hooves, then came forage, and fibre, then the very early days of mineral balancing. Then came the hindgut, and the realisation that what horses had actually evolved to eat was far from what many of us – me included – had been merrily tipping into feedbowls for years.

Suddenly I was turning feed bags round and reading labels properly for the first time. And once I'd seen it, I couldn't unsee it. I got a trimmer and changed the way I fed my own horses. I simplified things, and put forage and fibre firmly back at the centre. Then I watched my horses change beyond all recognition, after watching them metabolically crash in front of me (all in Our Story).

Later, when EquiNatural came along, owners started telling us similar stories. Sometimes they'd bought a supplement from us, yes, but somewhere along the way they'd also looked again at the feed bowl – stripped something out, simplified things, changed the forage or got the nutritional foundations in better shape – and suddenly the horse looked different.

So naturally I became evangelical, and I was on a mission. But twenty years later? I’m knocking on a bit now so you could say I've mellowed. Well. Sort of. In truth though?

It's not what we set out to do...

Forage-first, fibre-conscious, species-appropriate feeding isn't the lonely little corner of the horse world it felt like twenty years ago.

Back then Thunderbrook was one of the few voices quite rightly banging the forage-fibre feeds drum, but there's vastly more information available now, and forage analysis is commonplace.

We also understand far more about the equine gut and microbiome than we did then, and there are many excellent equine nutritionists whose actual job it is to work out what an individual horse should be eating.

And while I'm still passionate that the nutritional foundations underneath a horse matter enormously, I no longer feel the need to have an EquiNatural ruling on every ingredient known to horsekind.

• Alfalfa? Depends on the horse.
• Haylage? Depends on the horse – and the haylage.
• Beet? Interesting one.
• Oil? What sort, how much and why?
• Soya? I'm no longer prepared to spend my Friday night arguing about it.
• Wheat? Crikey. If you've ever read my old Wheat page, you'll know that one definitely caught me on a particularly energetic day.

But you get the idea, and somewhere during those twenty years my question changed. After I stopped shouting from the rooftops I then started asking, “Is this something horses should eat?” These days I'm more about, “Why are we feeding this to this horse?”

Feed your horse like a horse

After all those pages, all those rabbit holes and all those years, this is the bit I still come back to.

The horse is a grazing herbivore. Their digestive system is designed around regular (trickle feeding) intake of fibrous plant material, with an extraordinary microbial population in the hindgut fermenting that fibre and turning it into something the horse can use.

That's the horse in front of us - with grass forage fibre sat at the centre of the picture. And in truth I can't see that I'd ever budge from that principle.

But – and here's where Twenty-Years-Older Carol starts interfering with the original pages – “feed your horse like a horse” isn't a prescription, and it doesn't mean every horse should eat exactly the same thing. And it certainly doesn't mean the native pony with metabolic issues, the competition horse in hard work, the elderly horse with poor teeth, or the youngster still growing all need the same feed bowl.

Horses, annoyingly, are individuals - who knew!

So these days I'd use “Feed your horse like a horse” as the starting point rather than the final answer. Start with the biology - then look at the horse standing in front of you.

And while we're standing by the feed bowl…

Oh my, some of the feedbowls I've seen over the years.

You start with a perfectly sensible handful of something. Then someone recommends another something, then the physio mentions something else, then there's the supplement your friend at the yard swears changed her horse overnight, then you've got the thing you bought six months ago and are still feeding because there's half a tub left. And before you know it, Ned’s breakfast has more ingredients than Christmas dinner.

Thing is, there are now hundreds of different feeds and feed companies. So these days I'd rather ask what each thing is there to do - what does this horse actually need? What job is this feed doing? What nutritional gap is this supplement filling? And are three different products all providing the same thing?

And if we can't remember why something went into the feedbowl in the first place… There's probably a clue there.

Turn the bag around

Why? Because the front of the bag is just shiny marketing. It's the back that tells you what you're actually feeding - look at the ingredients, look at the analysis, and make sure you’re happy with them. If it's made from grass - feed it. If it's not? That's up to you.

At the end of the day I still think of the feedbowl primarily as a useful carrier for whatever supplements or balancer they actually need. But if you're staring at the back of the bag thinking you need a degree to understand it? That's where a good equine nutritionist earns their tea and biscuits.

Forage first…

... Although even that isn't quite as simple as it once sounded.

My old mantra was pretty much Hay. Hay. And more hay. And don't get me wrong - I still love – and swear by – hay. But…

Grass changes with the season, weather, species, maturity, soil and management. And hay changes according to what was growing in the field, when it was cut, how it was dried and how it was stored.

And then we have the horse. One horse can look fabulous on a forage that sends another one completely off-piste.

So yes, forage remains fundamental – but if I'm allowed to have a personal opinion, I've always preferred hay - mainly because dear old Murf's gut would produce projectile faecal wall art at the mere sniff of haylage.

Then my thinking was reinforced through my later studies with Dr Christina Fritz, particularly around fermented forage and the microbial environment of the hindgut. And I'm still completely interested in that – because hay and haylage aren't microbiologically identical, and what we feed can influence the hindgut ecosystem.

But I no longer think reducing that enormously complicated biology to hay = good, wrapped hay = bad is the way to go these days - especially for our spring pollen allergy horses who have been given the gift of wrapped hay. It's always about looking at the horse - how are they doing on it? Droppings normal? Comfortable? Holding weight? Any bloating? Any obvious change when forage changes? Because ultimately, the horse gets a vote too.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the gut

Nope... you're not getting me away from the gut that easily!

If anything, twenty more years of studying the equine gut have made me more interested in it – because the horse doesn't digest fibre alone – there’s an entire microbial ecosystem involved. And lest we forget:

• Two horses can eat the same thing and respond differently.
• Their gut microbial communities may differ.
• Their age, stress, medication history, movement, health and metabolic picture may differ.

Which is why one of the lines I come back to again and again over the years is - nutrition isn't just what went in. It's also digestion, microbes, absorption, conversion, utilisation and cellular delivery.

The raw materials still matter

And this is probably where feeding properly meets EquiNatural again, because however clever the rest of the body is, it still needs raw materials.

Protein and amino acids, minerals, vitamins, essential fatty acids, energy. All involved in building and maintaining everything from muscle and hoof horn to enzymes, connective tissue and normal cellular function. So when we're looking at a horse with several apparently unrelated problems, I'm still interested in whether those foundations are actually there.

But – simply putting a nutrient into the feed bowl isn't the end of the story. The horse still has to digest, absorb, convert and use it.

Which is why it’s not always about adding more, but more about considering why what’s already going in doesn't appear to be getting the job done. And sometimes, of course, the answer has nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition.

So where does EquiNatural fit these days?

If you need somebody to balance your forage analysis, calculate a growing youngster's ration, work out precisely how much protein your competition horse requires or construct a complete feeding programme for a medically complicated horse, there are properly qualified equine nutritionists who do exactly that.

What we do is help you understand where EquiNatural's nutritional and herbal support might fit within the bigger picture.

So yes, we may ask what your horse eats, what forage they're on, and we may mention that the foundations need looking at before yet another supplement joins the Christmas-dinner feed bowl. And sometimes the answer to "Which EquiNatural product should I buy?" might genuinely be that before we add anything else, let’s get the diet looked at.

And after all that…

Learning about feeding changed the way I looked at my own horses. It changed the way I thought about hooves, then their gut systems, then their nutrition, then eventually the whole horse in front of me.

And over the years we've had owner after owner tell us that one of the biggest turning points for their horse came when they stepped back and changed the foundations – sometimes simplifying the feed bowl rather than adding anything else to it. Which means more than anything to me.

We may very well have helped someone correct something that genuinely wasn't working. Or maybe the new diet better met that horse's nutritional needs. Or maybe the gut ecosystem changed, or we suggested removing something that simply didn't suit that horse. And maybe – several things changed at once!

And while there are things you can’t control - stress, sleep, herd dynamics - how you feed your horse is within your power. Your feed room is one of the most powerful places to support your horse’s health.

As Dr Tom O’Brien of Big Bold Health puts it: “Anything that’s going on in the digestive tract is influenced by what you put in the digestive tract. You put the wrong petrol in a Ferrari, and we know what’s going to happen.”

So there we have it. But after twenty years, there's one bit I won’t stop saying…

Always start with the horse.

Respect how their digestive system was designed to work; give them sound nutritional foundations; know why you're putting something in their feedbowl… then watch your horse.

Or, to put twenty years of rabbit holes, soapboxes, science and the occasional spectacular rant into five words:

Feed your horse like a horse.