| Archive for It's About The Horse The Free Forum for those Doing Parelli - and a whole lot More! "Anything forced and misunderstood can never be beautiful." Xenophon (430-355 B.C.), |
| ErinR76 |
Joe Camp on unimproved pastures, diet and feethttp://thehorseshoof.com/THH44_JoeCamp.pdfThis was a good article, not just for its technical knowledge about diet and horse health but for the appeal to trust your own research, knowledge and intuition. |
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| PasoBaby_CarolU |
Nice article. Wish my horses could live on pasture. The pastures in those pictures would have my herd rolly-polly and foundered in no time. I have a hard time with the few I can let on pasture now...
The pasture here is ready to go dormant...thank you Lord. LOL |
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| HopeMissouri |
Thank you for posting link. Good information.
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| CoolsLadyInRed |
I like Joe Camp's books and all he has to say. l obviously need more pea gravel around the place cuz my horse's feet don't look that good. LOL But Lady has been out on pasture all summer and isn't looking too bad. 
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| calatar |
He's going to have trouble...sooner or later. I had horses on unimproved pasture exactly like that and it always catches up to you eventually. |
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| becdubie |
That's a great article. I think I found my winter reading...Joe Camp.
About this...Alayna....
Are you saying that all horses will eventually have trouble on pasture? Here in MT...almost everyone I know has their horses out on pasture, mine have pasture and they graze 8-10 months out of the year. I keep them off in the spring and restrict the # of hours they are out each day the rest of the time (6-8 hrs our grazing each day) but that is really more for the grass than them, to prevent overgrazing the land. I know people who have their horses out on pasture as the horses sole source of food. Growing up...our horses were never restricted from grazing..they only got fed hay in the dead of winter when everything was dormant. I don't remember any health issues, the only sick horse we ever had got bit by a rattle snake...he recovered. So it could be a regional thing...the vets around here say that the natural prarie grass is perfect for a horses diet...if you can, turn them out to eat. They hesitate to suggest suppliments other than plain white block salt. |
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| Clarissa |
There’s a major disparity here. We tend to only think of backyard type horses, those owned & kept mostly for hobby purposes.
What about all the working horses that spend their whole lives on ranches or broodmares that rarely see human hands until necessary. They live in the same or similar pastures as the cattle or sheep the ranch keeps. I don’t see them coming down with all manner of hoof problems & it’s not because nature weeded out the sick & injured. Ranch owners breed or buy their work horses & they live on large acreage 100’s or 1000’s of acres in size. Those horses are generally always fit & healthy. The odd one might get hoof cracks or something & often most are never shod. Also many only get cursory hoof trimming prior to the mustering season. Other than that they wouldn’t get much trimming at all. In Australia there are 100,000’s of working horses spread across 1000’s of cattle & sheep stations throughout the country. The ones I dealt with were rarely kept shod, maybe if we were mustering in rugged country they were shod just for that or in some country it was just too stony to ride without shoes but after mustering season was over the shoes were removed & horses sent back to their main paddocks without shoes until needed again next year. There is little inbetween care for those horses & same goes for the broodmares. I don’t recall ever doing 6-8weekly hoof trims on the horses on any station I worked on. They were rounded up prior to mustering season, inspected for serviceability, treated as necessary, shod if necessary, worked once a week for the 8wks of mustering, then shoes removed & bushed again till next year. Some might be kept closer to home for other purposes & they may get more attention because they got ridden more often. As an example a cattle station might have 20 broodmares running in a 1000 acre paddock & 60-100 work horses running in a 2000ac paddock on their own or with the cattle & at mustering time 20-60 would be drafted out & held close to the homestead in a better pastured 1-300ac paddock. Lame ones would be seen too & bushed again. Basically they had to get better by themselves. But rarely were they lame from pasture. It was almost always misadventure/injury. Station work horses here usually get the best pasture on the station or are rotated through after the cattle on partly or fully improved paddocks. If horses always came up lame from pasture, those would not be the generally accepted methods of keeping work horses. I’m sure ranchers in America don’t spend days at a time every 6-8wks rounding up all their horses off rangelands & doing their feet. Some smaller ranches might if they have time but big places just wouldn’t have that sort of available manpower or time. The horses have to look after themselves, and they do! So there’s got to be more to it. There has got to be some common thread that binds hobby horses & separates them from rangeland work horses. What we have to think about are all the things that are done to & with hobby horses that aren’t done to or with ranch work horses to find the common denominator. |
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| Mandy'sMarty |
The difference is probably in the amount of work performed by 'hobby horses' compared to the work performed by ranch horses and wild horses. I know from my own experience that my mare, who is very metabolically sensitive, is able to manage on wild, unmanaged pasture (very little fescue) 24/7 as long as she gets sufficient exercise.
I believe the exercise she gets enables her to maintain metabolic balance. The exercise she gets also provides the stimulation her feet need to be healthy. Mandy has recovered from a critical founder episode last year triggered by endophyte fungus toxicity from the fescue pasture she once lived on. We are now preparing to compete in our third endurance ride since her recovery. I intend to ride her barefoot in the Limited Distance 25 mile ride tomorrow. |
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| ErinR76 |
exactly. and combine the workload (or lack thereof) of hobby horses, with the fact that many people who have hobby horses tend to pamper them (with food) and keep them on the higher end of the BCS scale the entire year round, and there's your thread of commonality.
Calatar did you read the article? (not being snippy, just asking!) Joe doesn't improve the pastures and also keeps the horses thinner in the winter so that going into spring, they are able to handle (because they NEED) the richer grasses. |
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| PasoBaby_CarolU |
Also, wild grasses are much lower in sugar then hybrid pasture grasses and yard grasses. Grass seed is developed for weight gain in cattle. Works like that on horses too. And this is the same problem with today's alfalfa vs that I grew up with. | ||||
| becdubie |
ahhh I get it...it just never occured to me that people would make pastures our of yard grasses...I can imagine that would cause problems. Our pasture is all natural grass. I was complaining to my Dad that we haven't been able to put the horses out on the shop side because of some work we've been doing and that the grass is all brown and dead. He told me that's the best kind of grass for the horses they will love it all winter long. |
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| calatar |
No, I'm saying that if you run enough horses on southern pastures (what I have the most experience with) for long enough you will have trouble with at least some of them. It is my understanding that the grass common in the west is lower in sugar and therefore less risky than the grass in the south. That being said, native grasses are diminishing ( http://safergrass.org/pdf/changing_grass.pdf ). Even "unimproved" pasture in the south has more higher sugar grasses than is tolerable for most horses.
No I make a point of not reading articles and being critical... 
Didn't he say he was going to try to do that next winter because he failed to do that this past one? The pastures in the south (GA where I was from and TN where is talking about) are often high in sugar and can have large amounts of fescue. Of the grasses that he mentioned in Part One, fescue and orchard are among the grasses with the highest genetic potential for NSC. http://safergrass.org/pdf/GrassCHO-Safer.pdf |
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| ErinR76 |
"No I make a point of not reading articles and being critical..."
LOL! just making sure 
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