The Equinist: Articles and Commentary by Susan Kauffmann

In recent years, many people have started to discover that a diet closer to what horses eat in the wild – mostly forage with little or no grain – can have great health benefits, including a lower incidence of gastric ulcers and colic. However, it turns out that how wild horses eat may be just as important as what they eat. Proponents of “slow feeding” – using feeders that cause the horse to consume their hay more slowly – believe that this practice has many benefits – for both horses and owners.                  Studies of horses living in natural environments have revealed that horses generally graze up to 16 hours a day, rarely going without eating for more than a few hours at a time. As native grasses tend to be relatively sparse, free-living horses often get only a few blades of grass before they must walk to the next little mouthful. This type of grazing takes time, providing a small but steady inta...

Horse eating out of 1.5" hole size Nibblenet I just came across an ad for a training barn that mentioned the fact that they feed "twice a day", as if this were a selling point. While it is a common practice in the horse industry to feed on a twice daily schedule, this is terribly inadequate if you look at the horse's biological requirements. Please allow me to explain why. Horses were designed by nature as "trickle feeders", meaning that they are meant to take in small amounts of food over a long period of time. In natural settings, horses graze at least 16 hours a day, with the pattern being nibble a little, walk a bit, nibble a little more. The whole physiology of their digestive system is set up to accommodate this model of consumption, starting with the fact that horses are constant acid secreters. This differs from humans, whose stomachs only secrete acid in the presence of food. The stomach of the horse, however, produces hydrochloric acid at...