Category: Exercise

Chronically obese horses face daunting task to lose weight

Posted on: December 5, 2011

A handout titled “Assessing energy balance” by the University of Kentucky looks at the overweight horse’s nutritional needs. In the section titled “My horse is too fat,” it says quick weight gain in a horse is easier to turn around than chronic overweightness. For example, a horse whose diet wasn’t reduced when it quit exercising has an easier time losing that weight than a horse that has been obese for a long time. The chronically obese horse likely has some lameness issue that may have been caused by being fat, so it’s dietary needs are very low, meaning it’s difficult to reduce a diet enough to get this horse to lose weight.

The article gives a lot of numbers, unfortunately in kilograms, but it basically says that a normal horse should consume 1.5 percent of its body weight, or 15 pounds of food for the 1,000 pound horse. To lose weight, the horse has to cut back. We’ve done the numbers-crunching too many times, and it all comes down to how many calories are in the feed you are feeding, with hay having a lot of variables.

But, here’s what I found interesting in this article and not in a good way. It says a horse being given fewer calories has lower maintenance requirements because all the things associated with eating — chewing, digestion, nutrient absorption and pooping — are reduced. So, if you reduce the feed for your horse, the horse’s calorie requirements are even lower and you have to reduce the feed even more to get the weight off.

Adding insult to injury, as the horse loses weight, those needs to go down even further. So, a horse that’s on an extreme diet isn’t going to get to come off that diet if it wants to maintain that weight.

Not surprisingly, the article cautions that feeding a low enough level of food for the obese horse to lose weight might not be the best for the digestive track or the horse’s mindset.

And, it suggests rather than restricting average quality hay, feeding a low-calorie hay. A three-hour search online of “low calorie hay” will get you nowhere. Look for more material on that in the next post.

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Editor’s note on June 15, 2015:

I wrote this post before reading Juliet Getty’s post on treating the insulin resistant horse. I no longer think counting calories is a good way to treat a laminitic horse. Read Getty’s article for an excellent summary of everything that goes wrong in the insulin resistant horse and how to approach treatment.

Does using several piles of hay work for the laminitic horse?

Posted on: November 10, 2011

In 2008, a veterinarian recommended that I invite to my farm an academic scientist and horseman who had been advising people on their laminitic horses to see if he had any thoughts on why I had such a high incidence of founder.

The scientist suggested the horses were foundering from stress.

At the time, I had been trying to feed the horses as little as possible (and I now know they were still getting more calories than they should have), and the scientist said the stress might be coming from them having so little to eat.

He recommended instead that I give them all the hay that they wanted but that I spread it in the far reaches of the horses’ pastures and paddocks so they had to keep moving if they wanted to eat. I didn’t follow his recommendation to the letter because I knew my horses couldn’t consume large quantities of hay.

But for the last three years, on days when it hasn’t rained or snowed, I have taken one extra flake of hay at each meal and divided it into four tiny sections and placed it in four places in my pasture. And it has forced the horses to move around more than normal to go get that extra flake of hay.

In light of my newfound information on how many calories a flake of hay has — 2,640 at last count — I’m now interested in whether the amount of calories the horses expend to go get the hay is enough to offset the calories they get eating that extra flake. Admittedly, this is an imperfect way to figure this out.

Each horse would get an extra 1,320 calories per meal.

It takes my horses 80 seconds to walk around the back of my house and get to that pasture from their shed. They have to walk about 408 feet to do it.

The National Research Council estimate a horse burns 1,000 calories per hour walking. That would work out to 16.66 calories per minute. For my horses to walk 80 seconds is about 22 calories. They may walk out to that pasture six times in the evening to check if the flake of hay they ate has magically reappeared. So, six times out and back to their shed is 12 trips times 22 calories is 264 calories. Those 264 calories they expend can’t begin to balance the 1,320 calories each horse is taking in, so I’m going to conclude that it’s a failed strategy to try to put a little extra hay out to make the horses walk from a calorie burning standpoint.

Totaling up the caloric excess: Each horse is taking in 3,960 extra calories per day from the extra half flake per meal per horse. Each is expending 792 calories per day doing the extra walking. Maybe.

If I just take the two flakes of hay the horses get per meal and split those flakes between their pasture and shed, we’d be in better shape calorie-wise, but, as I’ve said, trying to split up two flakes into multiple piles is a bit daunting. In fact, I do split those two up already, but it makes four little piles that get scarfed down in maybe a half hour.

I feel like, if I really want to feed two overweight, insulin resistant, laminitic horses correctly, I should just walk along and sprinkle hay bits in a little trail around my farm, Hansel and Gretel-style, and make the horses walk around to get it, which would limit their eating to crumbs basically. If I lived in California, with its consistent weather, that might actually work. I don’t think it’s going to work in Missouri during the winter.

How many calories does your laminitic or foundered horse burn exercising?

Posted on: November 6, 2011

Editor’s note on June 15, 2015:

I wrote this post before reading Juliet Getty’s post on treating the insulin resistant horse. I no longer think counting calories is a good way to treat a laminitic horse. However, the included material related to calories is correct.

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The National Resource Council’s equine nutrition report, released in 2007, provides information on how much energy horses expend during exercise in addition to giving dietary requirements.

The NRC says that an 1,100 pound horse burns 5,000 calories if it trots for two hours. And the horse burns 2,000 calories if it walks for two hours.

Breaking that down a little bit, a horse trotting for one hour burns 2,500 calories. Trotting for 10 minutes works out to 417 calories. That’s pretty good for 10 minutes of work.

A horse walking for one hour burns 1,000 calories, and a horse walking for 10 minutes burns 167 calories.

By contrast, the average male running for an hour burns about 940 calories or 157 calories in 10 minutes, according to NutriStrategy.

Ten minutes is important in looking at laminitic horses, because some research suggests that 10 minutes of exercise a day is enough to lower a horse’s insulin level.

In 1992, researchers at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University reported that 10 minutes of exercise significantly reduced insulin resistance and helped ponies lose weight in as little as six weeks. The ponies were put on a treadmill and required to walk for one minute, trot for one minute and canter for eight minutes (hard to imagine making a pony canter on a treadmill). This was their only exercise. The rest of the time, they were stalled. The ponies lost a significant amount of weight during this time, changing body shape, losing girth size and seeing more muscle definition. Researchers noted that improved insulin sensitivity was maintained in the six weeks after exercise was stopped.

If your horse burned 417 calories in that 10 minutes, and everything else were kept equal, the horse would burn 2,919 calories a week.

To lose a pound of body fat, a horse must create a deficit of 3,500 calories, either from eating less or exercising more. If the horse burned an additional 2,919 calories a week trotting for 10 minutes every day, the horse would be pretty close to losing that pound.

If your horse needs to lose 200 pounds, 1 pound a week may not sound very helpful, but every diet has to start somewhere.