Tag: hay

Slow-feed hay nets help laminitic horses

Posted on: April 15, 2013

These are two slow-feed hay nets send to me by a reader named Angie. They are put together quite professionally.

These are two slow-feed hay nets sent to me by a reader named Angie. They are put together quite professionally.

I avoided the slow-feed hay net trend for a long time because my gelding, Kurt, has a history of putting his front feet where they don’t belong. I was convinced I’d come home from work to find him hanging from the wall.

One of my readers, Angie, convinced me that Kurt couldn’t get his foot through the slow-feed nets, and she sent me two that she made from hockey netting. She also showed me a video of her horse eating from a similar net. In the video, the horse shakes the net to drop some hay on the ground and then cleans it up before repeating the process. And his weight looks absolutely perfect.

After seeing that, I was on board. Angie mentioned that I might need to put some hay on the ground even while putting some in the nets until the horses got used to eating that way, so I did.

Kurt caught on to the slow-feed nets right away. Robin thought they were too much work. Eventually, Kurt soured on them, too, and the hay in the nets didn’t get eaten.

I asked Angie if I could cut some diamonds out of the nets to create bigger holes. That worked. The horses started eating the hay again. But it allowed the horses to pull out a lot more hay than they could from the original mesh. We needed a happy medium.

I thought I’d try larger mesh.

Thus, began my education on sports netting. There’s a lot of sports netting out there.

hay net penny comparison

Angie’s netting appears to be 1 1/4-inch mesh. A penny almost fills the opening.

The best way to judge netting size is with a penny. This is what all the websites use.

Angie’s hockey netting appeared to be about a 1 1/4-inch mesh in a diamond shape. There is also squared-shaped netting.

We thought 3-inch mesh might be better, but no one makes an affordable 3-inch mesh.

We found a 2-inch mesh on the Gourock website, but it was in a square pattern, and I wasn’t sure if a square pattern would be as easy for a horse to eat through; Gourock had a 1 3/4-inch mesh in a diamond pattern, and the website said it stretched. I emailed Gourock to ask if the store had an opinion on which would be better.

#36 x 1 and 34 diamond

This is how Gourock displays its mesh.

Gourock responded that its 1 3/4-inch diamond mesh was a very popular mesh for hay feeders.

Another consideration was knotted or knotless. Knotted sounded like it would be more heavy duty.

I ordered the 1 3/4-inch diamond-shaped knotted netting with a 381-pound breaking strength at 50 cents a square foot. I asked for a width of 60 inches so I could fold the width over, making each hay net 30 inches deep. I’d say 30 inches is almost right for a depth. A few inches shorter would have been better with the stretchy material. I figured my nets would be 2 feet across, so I would need a length of 12 feet for six nets. I ordered a few more feet so I could make mistakes.

I don’t think I ordered the right thing. The mesh size is fine, though the horses still prefer Angie’s nets with the cutout holes to having to pick the hay out of this larger mesh without the holes.

The Gourock rep warned me that the diamond pattern would be harder to work with than a square pattern. Yep, the diamond material is all over the place when you try to cut it. Speaking of which, my tip for cutting diamond-patterned netting is to cut left, then right, then left, then right in zig-zag pattern. If you do that, you will actually cut straight across.

Angie's seam

Angie’s seam

I did not order my hay mesh with borders, but that’s an option, and I think the border would have helped tremendously in attaching the sides together. I’m still struggling with this. Angie was able to wrap thin twine around the seams of her nets and make the seams perfect. I have not been able to do that. I’ve tried twice, and I give up. I have been tying knots along the sides with tarred Seine twine in a size 12 that I bought on Amazon. The tar is unnoticeable, if that seems off-putting. It’s suppose to keep the twine secure. Kurt untied some of the knots in my first model; my latest model has somewhat obsessive knotting, and it has survived.

If I were to reorder the netting from Gourock, I would get knotless, 2-inch square netting with borders on the netting, mostly likely the rope border unless I were to take up sewing and would be able to work with the nylon webbing border. The rope border would allow me to create a smooth and more secure seam.

My slow-feed net is black with a pink cord.

For the cord around the top, I used a 3/16-inch twine that I bought at Lowe’s and cut it at a length of 84 inches. I tried 72 inches, but that length didn’t allow me to pull the net as wide as I wanted when I filled it. The extra 12 inches means I have to wrap the cord an extra time around the post I’m using to hang the net, but that’s OK. I used a contrasting color, hot pink, so I’d be able to find the cord better when trying to fill my black netting, but it looks a little tacky. Angie used a white cord with her white netting, and that looks nice.

I used the cheapest snap I could find at Lowe’s. The snap needs to have a snap at one end and a circle at the other. After threading my twine through the snap and making a knot, I wrapped electrical tape below the knot, taping the twine ends to the twine, to secure the knot.

Electrical tape keeps my snap secure.

I am convinced that slow feeder nets are our best asset yet in overcoming the problems with today’s high-calorie and high-sugar hay.

The equine feed class that I took online through the University of Edinburgh recommended these nets, or at least using two of the regular nets, which would put more barriers in the way of the horse.

There are many small net products on the market. One Facebook reader suggested hay pillows, which her horses love, and I think these are really nice. I would say that mesh size is too small for my horses, given their demonstrated laziness, but maybe not, because they could push against the pillow to get the hay out. And the pillows allow the horses to move around to get some exercise.

This is where we come to my first concern about the nets. Once I put them up during the winter and got them adjusted to meet my horses’ approval, the horses didn’t move much. They stood in their shed all day pulling the hay out of the net. That’s not what I want to see happen. I want them moving. And a little less poop in the shed would not be a bad thing.

My second concern, or observation, is that my horses don’t bother eating hay from the nets if the horses are not madly in love with that bale. If I put the same hay on the ground, the horses will pick through it. Since we didn’t have a good hay year last year, not every bale is perfect.

Still, I am a fan. I’m a big fan. I’m kicking myself for being opposed to the idea in the early going.

Thank you, Angie.

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.

We are killing our laminitic horses with calories

Posted on: November 9, 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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We are killing our laminitic horses with calories.

That’s my conclusion. I had been thinking I had been starving my chronically laminitic horses for years only to discover I wasn’t even close.

I spent some time on the phone in November 2011 with an expert in equine nutrition, Dr. Scott King, a veterinarian who is now the equine products manager at Bayer Healthcare in the Animal Health Division. He used to be in charge of new product development at the Purina division that overseas equine feed and before that he was a practicing large and small animal veterinarian, who happened to be my vet.

He was doing me a favor in answering a question on a topic unrelated to calories, but that was all that was on my mind that week, and the conversation eventually turned to the appropriate amount of calories, officially kilocalories, that a horse should eat.

He said he believes that a maintenance horse needs fewer calories than the NRC recommendation of 15,000 calories that I’ve been quoting. He says the maintenance calorie requirement is 13,000, and he studied low-calorie diets for horses extensively, so he should know.

Prior to this conversation, I had taken my hay into my local feed store to make sure I had the weight correct. Using a USDA-calibrated scale, my flake was about 2 14/16 pounds, and I rounded up to 3 pounds for ease of doing the math, since flakes vary in size anyway.

Dr. King said brome hay tends to average 800 calories per pound. My brome was a bit more at 880 calories. Alfalfa is 900 calories.

If I multiplied 880 calories by 3 pounds, I got 2,640 calories for one flake.

I told Dr. King I thought that was impossible, adding: “That means that, if it’s raining and I decide to throw my horses an extra flake of hay to keep them busy while they stand in their shed, I’ve just given them several thousand extra calories.”

He said that’s right. Referring to horse obesity, he said: “I believe it’s all about the calories.”

As noted previously, each of my two horses had been getting six flakes of hay per day, or 15,840 calories a day.

They also had been getting a total of 1 pound of Purina’s Nature’s Essentials Enrich 32 (I weighed that, too), which has 1,100 calories per pound.

And the horses got a carrot a day, which was roughly 50 calories.

For a grand total of 16,990 calories.

If a pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories, and the horses were getting 3,990 extra calories a day by Dr. King’s standards, it didn’t take much to figure out why the 14-2 hand pony looked wide enough to be two ponies.

Dr. King recommended that I ride one at a walk and pony the other, since my efforts to make them do real exercise had failed due to mobility issues.

Note that all my horses foundered while in work, and a horse in work gets to eat considerably more calories..

Once a horse is foundered and cannot work, you definitely are dealing with a whole new meal plan, and likely most of us are overfeeding our laminitic horses immensely once they turn into lawn ornaments, thus cementing their fate as chronically laminitic horses for the rest of their lives.

Knowing what I’ve learned about how many calories are packed into a flake of seemingly harmless hay — what I once equated to a bowl of salad for humans — I now have to believe overeating played a major role in these recurring founder cases, even if I find out that excess iron or some other environmental factor gave the horses a big push.

Calories in hay and feed for laminitic and foundered horse

Posted on: November 7, 2011

A typical hay sample report shows the hay’s megacalories per pound in addition to the sugar and starch content. A megacalorie is 1,000 kilocalories, and a kilocalorie is what we know as a calorie. The rest of this article will use the familiar term of calorie.

My recent hay sample of brome hay says it has .88 megacalories, or 880 calories, per pound. If my horses are eating 20 pounds per day, they are getting 17,600 calories a day from their hay, which is wee bit over the 15,000 calories a day that the National Research Council is suggesting for a sedentary 1,000-pound horse, which might explain the big rolls of fat on my horses’ sides. For years with these hay results, I’ve been looking at the sugar and starch content to determine if I had the right hay. But, now I’m taking into consideration the calorie content, and the horses are getting too many calories. Reviewing my hay tests going back to 2004, the calories per pound all fall within a similar range. This particular hay is not extreme.

As for feed, the Animal Health Foundation, a laminitis research foundation, compiled the calorie amounts of many common equine feeds and distributed the list in 2007. I’m attaching a copy of that here since I can’t find it online. Most feeds have 1,000 to 1,500 calories per pound. My horses are getting a pound each of forage supplement.

The hay is particularly frustrating because my horses go through two flakes of hay at each of their three meals in no time and look at me as if I’m starving them. And, my strategy for exercising them has been to spread the hay out in several areas so they have to walk to get it. I can’t leave much of a pile in each place if I’m trying to stick to the two flakes per horse rule. And if I leave too small of a pile on a windy day, it just blows away. To find out that I’m 2,600 calories over their limit while struggling to stick to two flakes per horse per meal makes it all feel a little hopeless.

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

Posted on: November 6, 2011

Editor’s note on June 15, 2015:

—–

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.

How many calories should you feed your insulin-resistant laminitic horse?

Posted on: November 5, 2011

Most owners of laminitic horses that have the insulin form of the disease are willing to move mountains to help their horse, but they don’t know where to turn. Often, they bring in the best farrier possible to try new shoeing techniques.

But the problem at least in part is related to the horse’s diet. Fix the dietary problem, and you have a much better chance of saving the feet.

Figuring out the content of what you’re feeding a horse is not an easy challenge. But some of this information is available. The process does require having your hay tested for content, as well as your grass, if your horses are on pasture.

The National Resource Council of the National Academies (top scientific minds in the country) released updated horse nutrition recommendations in 2007.

Horses’ food usually is assessed in megacalories. A megacalorie is 1,000 kilocalories, or calories as we refer to kilocalories in the human world.

The NRC says a 1,000-pound sedentary horse needs 15,000 calories a day of digestible energy, plus 1.2 pounds of crude protein, 18 grams of calcium and 13 grams of phosphorus. The numbers go up for a 1,200-pound horse to 18,000 calories, 1.5 pounds crude protein, 22 grams calcium and 15 grams phosphorus.

To lose a pound of body fat, an individual, including a horse, must create a deficit of 3,500 calories, either from eating less or exercising more. Generally, health officials suggest a person do this by reducing caloric intake by 500 calories a day for a loss of a pound a week. It seems reasonable that a horse could do the same since a horse gets a much bigger allotment of calories. But there are many challenges in pursuing that goal. There is no easy way to figure out how many calories a horse is eating. And a horse that is chronically obese apparently has a much more difficult time losing that weight than a horse that put on exess weight recently.

A study on iron overload and insulin resistance as it might relate to laminitic horses

Posted on: October 26, 2011

Since I wrote about iron and insulin resistance in horses two days ago, I stumbled over a paper by Dr. Eleanor Kellon that appears to have been created in 2006. The title is “Iron status of hyperinsulinemic/insulin resistant horses.”

Kellon conducted a study to determine if insulin resistant horses and ponies also show iron overload in their blood.

Insulin resistant horses and ponies were divided into two groups: those that received a balanced mineral diet and those that ate whatever minerals crossed their path. Another group of adult horses and ponies free of obvious disease served as controls.

There was a significant elevation in body iron in the insulin resistant horses on uncontrolled mineral intakes.

Kellon says: “Risk factors for equine insulin resistance have not been completed identified but likely represent an interaction between genetic predisposition, underlying disease states and the environment. Since genetic factors are beyond our control and drug therapy for PPID (Cushing’s) does not necessarily lead to resolution of IR, identifying external factors has the potential to improve control. The role of iron overload as a risk factor for IR and therapeutic effect of lowering body iron levels has been documented in man.”

And she concludes: “Animals on mineral balanced diets had normal TSI and ferritin levels, and improvement in their insulin resistance, but since other measures were undertaken concurrently (e.g. reduction in NSC of the diet), the effect of the mineral balancing per se could not be determined. More extensive prospective and intention to treat studies are necessary to clarify the role iron might play in equine IR.”