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The best ways to promote healthy weight gain in horses are:
Feed for a weight gain of 0.5 to 0.75 pounds daily. Three to four pounds of an additional grain product can meet this gain if the horse’s body weight is stable. Use the table below as a guideline. Horses take about three weeks to adapt to a high fat diet.
After addressing worms, teeth and health, the most important feeding step when you want a horse to gain weight is to provide as much pasture or grass/meadow hay as the horse can eat. You can do this by either giving your horse 24 hour access to pasture or by feeding just enough hay that a little is left over each day.
An often-palatable fat source is corn oil added to your horse’s grain. You can begin with one to two ounces of corn oil per meal to see if your horse will eat his feed with the added oil, and if he finds it tasty, you can work up to two cups per day.
The best feed for an underweight horse is good quality hay or pasture grass. 1 Give him free choice hay unless there is some medical reason (such as metabolic syndrome, founder (also known as laminitis) or Cushing’s disease) not to.
The best initial feed is usually good quality grass hay. Mature grass hay or oat hay can be too bulky and low in energy for horses to consume sufficient energy to gain weight. Some veterinarians recommend alfalfa (lucerne) hay because it is higher in minerals and protein than grass hay.
Dried beet pulp is available in shredded or pelleted form. … You may consider feeding beet pulp if your horse is a “hard keeper” to increase weight gain, if the quality of your hay is poor, or if your horse has problems chewing or digesting baled hay, which is especially common in older horses.
Beet pulp can be used to help underweight horses gain weight, as it provides approximately 1,000 kcals per pound (one quart of dry beet pulp shreds weighs approximately 0.5-0.6 pounds).
For boosting calories and keeping omega balance in check, canola or soybean oil would be a far better choice than corn oil,” explained Whitehouse. Fish oil has superior fatty acid content, with an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of 6:1, but it is generally not fed to increase energy consumption.
Poor-quality feed and forage will also have lower levels of nutrients, which can easily result in deficiencies, especially if the horse is a picky eater. … A deficiency in just one nutrient or amino acid can be enough to cause a horse to lose weight or prevent a horse from gaining weight.
Stull says the best approach for initial refeeding consists of frequent small amounts of high-quality alfalfa. The amount should be increased slowly at each meal, and the number of feedings decreased over 10 days. After 10 days to two weeks, horses can be fed as much as they will eat.
The too skinny horse may look ewe necked, the withers may appear very pronounced and the spine may be easily felt beneath the skin. The ribs and hip bones may be sharply visible and easily felt and the haunches appear sunken. Horses become too thin for a number of reasons including lack of food, stress or illness.
When feeding a horse with no teeth or with very severe tooth damage, feed a slurry of complete pelleted feed and/or mashed alfalfa pellets, and add in some long stemmed soft leafy alfalfa hay because horses without teeth will still want to chew on fiber.