365
Days in Horse Country –Let Them Eat Hay... and Lots of It
Horses eat hay, and with good reason. It’s the most palatable and accessible type
of forage available for the domestic horse.
The horse evolved over time as a grazer, which means nature designed them to consume large amounts of low-quality forage. In the wild, the horse had to eat a lot of plant material to maintain body weight. The equine digestive system is an amazing machine that can pull nutrients from even the poorest quality grazing. The flipside of this is that the horse’s body is meant to slowly absorb large amounts of roughage, over many hours per day. In fact, wild horses forage for approximately eighteen hours each day.
In domestic life, horses are often fed infrequently, usually only twice a day. They are often given large amounts of concentrate feed, such as grain or commercial horse food. They eat this food quickly and absorb its energy rapidly. This wreaks havoc with their digestive process and can even result in colic. After all, nature never intended them to eat this way. Horses are supposed to chew constantly, slowly ingesting low-energy roughage.
Unfortunately, most horse owners don’t have the luxury of being able to graze their horses in pastures for many hours per day. Many horses live in paddocks, corrals, or even stalls, and they are dependent on their human caretakers to provide them with their meals.
Given this reality, the most natural way to feed horses is to provide them with hay, and plenty of it. Horses do best when fed at least three times per day, more often if possible. Some experts even recommend access to hay twenty-four hours a day. These meals should consist mostly of hays that are relatively low in protein, such as orchard grass, Bermuda grass, or timothy. Alfalfa hays are too high in calories and energy for most horses and they should be used in only small amounts, if at all. Grass hays most resemble the kind of feed horses have evolved to eat.
Michael