good diet for my old man
 

have a 22 year old gelding that i want to keep heathy and happy he is on hay, oates and senior suppements and vitamins he is rarely ridden do to arthritics my question is how much to feed what % of each should he get and is there smething that i should be giving him .. on bad day(having hard time walking) he gets butte

What brand of senior supplement/vitamin is he getting? How much?
Does he have trouble keeping weight on?
How are his teeth? Is he still able to chew effectively?

He has been recently floated. He does have trouble keeping weight on. He gets fed about 35 lbs of alfalfa 3 lbs of oats daily. He also get equine senior about 1 lb daily and glucosamine. The vet said he was to fat, so we put him out with our other horse and he lost weight. It has been a struggle to put the weight back on. He is being fed seperately now, but struggles gaining weight. He has been wormed.

I found beet pulp really fattened my old guy up, we had him on Renewal which helped his arthitis a lot!

Is that Purina Equine Senior? If so, 1 lb a day is really doing almost no good- their feeding directions for a 1000 lb horse not in work is 13.5 lbs daily, so that's the minimum you would need to feed daily to fulfill nutritional requirements. I'd look into replacing it with a ration balancer (which is designed to be fed at low rates of 1-2 lbs/daily), or just cutting it out completely. Purina makes two ration balancers- Enrich 32 for grass diets, and Enrich 12 for alfalfa diets. You'd want Enrich 12 since your horse is on an alfalfa only diet.

I've seen it mentioned a couple times that a horse on a straight alfalfa diet is getting pretty much everything they need nutritionally, but I haven't been able to find any studies on it, so I'm still not quite sure that's true, especially given that the nutritional value of hay is strongly dependent on the nutrient value of soil it was grown in. Additionally, hay loses nutritional value the longer it is stored.

Aside from alfalfa, I really like beet pulp and rice bran for putting weight on. Beet pulp needs to be soaked into a mash, but it can be fed safely in large quantities and is much healthier than feeding large quantities of grain.

Rice bran has a high fat content, which makes it great for weight gain/maintenance, but it also spoils quickly and has an inverted calcium-to-phosphorous ratio. You can get rice bran that is stabilized to increase the shelf life, and I wouldn't recommend buy any rice bran that hasn't been stabilized since it can spoil before it even gets sold by the feed store. You can also buy rice bran that has been fortified (calcium added to offset the high phosphorous), but given that you're feeding 35 lbs of alfalfa daily, it's really unnecessary. You generally want to limit the amount of rice bran to a few pounds daily.

I don't personally see much value in feeding oats, though I know many people feel otherwise.

Whole flax seed or oil is another great feed. Whole flax seed is about 8% fat (the oil is 100% fat) but the fat is very healthy type of fat, high in omega-3. This is especially important for horses that don't get fresh grass as their primary forage, since fresh grass has good levels of omega-3 that quickly break down when dried. Omega-3 is an anti-inflammatory fatty acid, while omega-6 promotes inflammation, so you'd definitely want to keep them balanced in a horse with a problem like arthritis.

The recommended amount you are quoting would be if the OP were using the feed as a "complete" feed - meaning in place of forage. Since the horse in question is receiving forage, the amount needed to supplement that would be lower than the 13.5 pounds recommended.

Mine has no teeth so I put him on ADM. It's not a senior fees but is actually easier for him to eat beacause it is so fine...
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Good point... those are the only feeding directions they have on the website, but looking at the guaranteed analysis, it's similar to other regular fortified grains that would be fed at 3-5 lbs/day for a 1000 lb horse. Still, 1 lb is not enough to meet nutritional needs.

i have used beet pulp was not sure if it was good for him he has all his teeth or most of :-) it has been very dry here so no grass what about a grass bail. and is purina equine senior. have not tried whole flexs but will .

it is equine senior ..