picky eater

Well my team has to be picky eaters, I have a bunch of nice grass hay round bails and they don't like them. My one horses since I got him was a little underweight, anyone know of a way to get him up to weight again, I have alfalfa small sqrs I've been feeding them now but I'm hoping that they will slowly come around to this grass hay...

Go easy on the alfalfa hay. Does the hay have any odor of cattle? That will deter horses. If the hay is course the beggars will try to pick out the fine stuff.

No doesnt smell at all, I did notice this is more stemmy the than the other stuff I was feeding though.

Once the green grass starts coming in plus the fact that you've been offering alfalfa, that nice grass hay that was gobbled up last month is suddenly no longer very appealing. They'll come back to it when they're good and hungry.

How do you figure that??

If the smell of cattle deters horses, how come almost every other property I drive past on my way to town has round bale feeders with cows and horses nestled right next to each other, munching away?

Very, very common to pasture cows and horses together here.

Exactly what I was thinking!

Our horses will reach for hay that is on the fence line between them and the maternity pens! (cow/calf pairs)

It depends if the horses are used to being around cattle
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Horses are more picky about the grass than cows and other grazing animals

Care to come tell my cows that?

My cows will NOT eat hay that falls on the ground, if it's not in their feeder, it's not getting eaten and it's not for lack of quality because if I pick up the dumped hay and put it back in the feeder, they eat it.

Horses make just as big a mess but they at least will clean up the edible stuff when the feeder runs out!

My horse has only ever seen a cow from a really far distance. I could yank hay out of my cow's mouth and go feed it to him and he wouldn't care. As long as the hay is good quality and not jumping out of his feeder to bite him, food is FOOD.

Sniffing hay and then rejecting it is not due to it being in the proximity of another species at some point. Now if the horse was jammed in the furthest corner of his pen quivering away because his hay smelled funky, I might buy that theory!