Horse-appropriate feeding
– but how?
When creating a healthy nutrition for horses it is indispensable to look at the physiological digestive process and the natural way of living of the animal. If these aspects are considered, horse feeding can actually be quite easy!Walking, eating, resting and social interaction – these have been a horses basics needs for millions of years and they are still stored in its genes.
In comparison to that it is only a very short time span of approximately four to six thousand years in which horses have been domesticated by humans. Thus, we still keep the same type of horse:
A flight animal that lives in a herd on wide open grassland, and spends up to 16 hours a day chewing grass and greenery.
Through this leisurely way of ingestion, horses can produce around 40 l of saliva daily, as well as lots of digestive liquids in the stomach, liver, pancreas and the intestine depending on what kind of feed they are eating and how it is composed. About 40,000 movements of the jaw are necessary to chew this daily amount of feed.
These are some numbers from todays modern horse world:
Feed |
Amout |
Production of saliva |
Time of ingestion |
Chewing movements |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feed | 1 kg | 1 l | 10 min. | 1.000 | |
| Hay | 1 kg | 3,5 l | 40 min. | 3.000 | |
Besides the production of saliva, chewing has a very positive effect on the horse’s psychological well-being. That is why it is useful to mix the daily concentrate feed with shredded crude fibre. This way you extend the time of ingestion and increase the number if chewing movement, as well as the production of saliva.