It's About The Horse

oldmac_donald · Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 7:02 pm Post subject:

Karen

If nothing else, use FeedXL. It's FREE TIL JUNE 10. It's hell of a lot easier then wrapping one's brain out the many many books and theories out there. It is Australian. It's unbiased towards feed companies.

Did I mention that it is free?
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The horse doesn't care what colour your Kool-Aid is - he will not drink it.

new2thejourney · Member Joined: 06 Mar 2009 Posts: 386

Oh my, why didn't I see the free thing the first time I visited??!! I feel so daft. The first time I saw the link, I went and had a look at it, but then I saw the fee and thought my husband would have a pink fit if I signed up for that, so I saved the link to 'talk to him about it later'. If you hadn't have told me AGAIN that it's free, well, lets just say I went back and had a good look around for how it can be free, so THANK YOU! from one dumb arsed bushwacker...

I have entered his details and found out that he needs more iodine, more vitamin E and less protein. Other than those few changes, we are doing okay with the feed. I did guesstimate how much hay he was eating per day, and I may have over estimated, but that's okay. He has free choice, so who knows how much he really eats??

It doesn't really explain what to add to the feed in what amounts to have an optimum diet. I have tried seaweed meal for the iodine with him, but he doesn't eat it and I don't want to add it to his meal if he doesn't like it...what a pickle. Is there an alternative? I've been scared off seaweed meal, seems lots of horses have died due to overdoses in it.

And vitamin E....from which food is high in that?

Thanks for bearing with me everybody, I really appreciate it.

Karen.
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Love and light to all xx

Leah · Member Joined: 02 Feb 2009 Posts: 1476

I don't understand with this obsession with seaweed meal. It can be VERy high in iodine and quite unsafe for horses.

What is the reason for feeding it?

The last time I looked, horses do not naturally gravitate to seaweed as a main food source.

Clarissa · Posted: Sun May 31, 2009 12:18 pm Post subject:

As a teenager I had a horse I used to take home to my parents place for holidays at the beach in nth Qld. It was a very small beachside village & BoBo was allowed to just roam free. He often went onto the beach & he liked to swim & roll in the sand (as did I

).

After some bad weather there was seaweed all over the beach & in the morning when I went looking for BoBo he was on the beach eating it!! He would pick up a great big long train of it & flap it around maddly to shake off the sand then rub it on his front legs like he was eating mangoes (which grew there by the hundreds).

Ever after that when I took him to the beach he would run along the sand high up near the dunes looking for seaweed!

Perhaps it was just the salt. But he also had access to saltweed, pigweed & other salty beach loving plants which would have been salty. His normal diet would've been defficient no doubt. I had no idea that many grasses & weeds were bad for them or that horses needed different diets to cattle!

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new2thejourney · Member Joined: 06 Mar 2009 Posts: 386

Horse Gypsy · Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2009 2:21 pm Post subject:

I don't really ever feed seeweed meal-- but it does have vitamins and minerals in it. I try to eat some sea weed in my diet-- it helps the body deal with toxins- according to chinese medicine. I actually use more spirulina then anything else.

cory · Member Joined: 15 Feb 2009 Posts: 44

Dredging up a very old memory here of something I read a long time ago about seaweed. The study was done in Australia/New Zealand and the reason feeding seaweed was because the minerals from the land was washing down into the ocean and what the pasture land was deficient in minerals was found in the seaweed. So feeding seaweed in those areas made sense.

Don't know how scientific or truthful all this is as I read it on the internet a long time ago. Could have just been someone else's opinion and we know there are lots of those.

tchofclas · Member Joined: 29 Nov 2011 Posts: 9 Location: Ontario

Something to think about re no gallbladder in horses. When my mare colic-ed at the University of Guelph, they took her off feed, and she'd already gone 24 hours without as her surgery was delayed. Over a course of 4 days she had very little to eat. They removed a garbage pail of bile from her, so it is obviously not produced in the gall bladder. Unlike people, who produce bile when needed, as in when we eat, horses produce it 24/7 because it would be normal for them to eat that way. Incidentally, when I picked her up on the 5th day, they did not want to release her, and still weren't feeding her. I used grain to get her on the trailer, and a full haynet for the 5 hour trip home, and she never colic-ed again!
Also, if we get bile from the gall bladder, do humans who have it removed have to stop eating oils? Not that I've ever heard.
Charlotte
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My treasures do not click together or glitter, they gleam in the sun and neigh in the night."
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