very interesting!!!!

i thought this was sooooooo cool,
well according to equus magazine giving your horses acess to grain anytime they want can actually be HEALTHIER for them! and that once they figure out there will always be grain for them to eat at anytime they will not gorge themselves with it. They did a test and they slowly started giving a certain amount of geldings a certain amount of grain...then they kept giving them more and more grain over a period of time...at first the horses would gorge themselves, but after about 3 weeks the geldings were on free-choice and they were only eating as much as they were before they started the experiment!!!! they also said that it is really bad for people to buy grain dense with nutreints and stuff just so that they can feed less, because the nutreints and other things (haha whoops, bad memory i cant remember the name they said!) is what usually caused laminitis,colic and other food sickness's.

did anyone else read this article? i thought it was great! but sadly we cant start feeding free choice at our barn because its a boarding barn, and that most of the horses get certain supplements that others cant have.

i dont want to hear a big arguement about this, it was tested, thats what it said in the magazine,period. i just thought i would share, its useful information anyway!!!

Reread the article...it's very misleading. They didn't give free-choice grain based feed. They a "very high-fiber, moderate energy-dense feed"---most likely a complete feed (designed to replace forage in the horse's diet).

I was thinking along the lines of a pasture horse, who doesn't need grain ALL the time. I did read that article and have that issue of magazine, lol. But I would never do that with my horses as none of them are stabled and they stay healthy and tend to get fat as it is =]

That seems a bit extreme, but I would think the best case scenario for grain is to feed smaller amounts more frequently rather than two big feedings morning and night. It just plays better into the all day grazing routine that horses have.

I also read the article, and I think it would be kind of like leaving hay thrown down.....I would rather just leave out his whole days grain ration, rather than say a whole tub full. It would probably be better for the natural grazing pattern, like myboypuck said.

my mom read it and thinks it was a good idea for our horses. except jasper loves his sweet feed

Yes, it did not apply to sweet feed, grain based feeds at all - it is misleading. My husband first told me about it, and when I thought it was talking about grain based, sweet feed types, I was horrified because I knew that couldn't be the case - but it talking about a more forage based, complete type feed. I would still be leary about trying it without a lot of vet based supervision.