Horse Feeding Techniques and Advice From Dr. Trevor Cook

Horse Feeding is a very important aspect of a horse's nutrition. Horse supplement providers like Royal Champion always aim to make up for any deficiency in a horse's diet in terms of quality and quantity.  Therefore, they focus on understanding the basics of the horse feeding habits and the quality of their normal horse feed rations.  For health and optimum performance, proper horse feeding ranks with good breeding, schooling, and training.

• Horses are fussy or picky eaters and their refusal to feed on anything, especially proper horse supplement, can cause owners and trainers great frustration and even stress. Naturally, their refusal means that they are not only subject to deficiencies of essential nutrients but their horse feeding habits shown by their intake of vitamins, horse feeds and most especially daily horse supplements like Royal Champion provides suffers too.


• Horses may shy away from their horse supplement as a result of their age, type of pasture, aroma, freshness, physical characteristics (appearance and physical form) and their individual partiality to certain flavors. These horse feeding problems can lead to poor consumption.


• Horse feeding is both an art and a science that needs to be perfected in order to achieve optimal results for the equines. The horse's stomach is quite small and cannot contain a full horse feed plus several liters or gallons of water at the same time. Water must be of good quality and is better given when the horse is at rest and allowed to drink smaller quantities frequently.


• Horses chew their feed and horse supplements thoroughly and therefore require relatively long horse feeding times, usually about one hour.


• Horse supplements from Royal Champion are very important to the horse nutrition. To avoid deficiencies of salt in all phases of their lives, horses should have access to salt in the form of free standing blocks of "licks". Regular horse feeding with Royal Champion horse supplements, all of which contain salt helps in increasing this deficiency. Deficiency of salt will also affect their horse feeding habits.


• Oats are generally recognized as a favorite feedstuff for horses. About 50% of oats mixed with traditional horse feed are recommended for thoroughbreds in training with about 40% of grass or hay. The remainder is made up of wheat, bran, chaff, or barley and Royal Champion supplements at all phases of their lives. This is the only way to avoid deficiencies. High quality grass may contain up to 15% protein, but the content of poor quality grass or hay may be as low as 2.5%

• Grass and hay quality depends on the essential mineral components in the soil on which it grows. Many soils are deficient however in one or more essential mineral nutrients in the horse feeding diet, nutrients that are mostly found in a good quality horse supplement. Soils may vary in content even from one pasture to another. The only way to avoid this hit and miss situation is to mix Royal Champion Horse Supplements with the horse feed, such as cereals, to ensure that the minerals and trace elements required are available.


• An adult horse under average workload requires about 2 kilograms of horse feed per day (air dried weight) per 100 kilograms of body weight (4 lb 6oz per 220lb), in addition to a regular intake of horse supplement.


• Proteins make up, after the water, the most abundant constituent of the horse's body. An adequate supply of proteins which are readily available are needed to repair muscular wear and tear and building up or rebuilding the horse's body tissues. Horse feeding techniques and products are very important, especially Royal Champion Horse Supplements. These are vital in providing nutrients and amino acids as the building blocks to restore normal protein levels quickly.


• If a horse is not fed quickly after strenuous exertion (within a few hours) with Royal Champion Horse Supplements, the high performance horse will suffer permanent damage to its body tissues, particularly in their legs with a decrease in muscle mass energy and in stages of performance.

Horse feeding advice to trainers:

• Do not use mega doses of Royal Champion Horse Supplements or combine with other lesser supplements. Royal Champion supplements for horses are formulated to comply with recommended daily allowance and in the correct balance between their nutrients if given in the correct dose.


• Excesses of several of the essential nutrients are never beneficial and can be injurious and seriously risk the health of the horse.
  

Note on Racehorse's Statistics:


• Every year in the UK about 1,700 thoroughbred mares go to stud. For every 1,000 of them about 300 finally appear on a racetrack.


• Study of wastage among racehorses in terms of the greatest number of days lost on the basics of inability to take part in training, cantering, or racing showed that up to 67.5% of days lost were caused by lames; 20% by respiration problems, 19% by hoof conditions, 18% muscle conditions, carpus 14%, fetlock joints 10%, tendons 10% and sore shins 9%.
  
  
• Proper regular horse feeding with Royal Champion horse supplements could have avoided most of these problems.