Feeding Old Horses with Worn Out Teeth
A problem to sink your teeth into
Older horses often have worn out teeth, necessitating some changes in feeding. Quite often we are contacted by owners regarding old horses with very poor or no effective grinding teeth (molars) that are losing weight. The first concern is finding feeds that require little chewing and/or can be soaked to make it easier for your older horse to consume safely.
Make sure you’re feeding enough
Upon looking at the diets for these horses, we often find that their owners have done a wonderful job of this in addition to forages in the form of chaff, hay cubes or chopped hay BUT they simply aren’t feeding enough of this forage. So, our tip is feed lots of forage.
You should be aiming to feed 2% of an older horse’s ‘ideal bodyweight’ (the weight you would like them to be) in forage they can easily eat per day. This is equivalent to 2 kg for every 100 kg of their bodyweight (or 2 lb for every 100 lb), or 10 kg/day for a 500 kg horse (22 lb/1100 lb horse).
Things like chaff (chopped hay) or soaked hay cubes are ideal. You can also use high energy fibres like sugarbeet pulp, soybean or lupin hulls and copra meal. But we recommend you feed at least half of your horse’s forage as chaff or hay cubes so that there is some indigestible fibre in the mix to keep your horse’s gut full and reduce the risk of colic.
A common mistake: measure by weight, not by your eye
To avoid the trap of thinking you are feeding enough forage but actually are not, please weigh what you are feeding. 2 litres of chaff only weighs around 250 grams, so 10 kg of chaff could be as much as 40 litres of chaff per day, which looks like a lot!
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
Click here to join the FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group
