Question

I have a senior Paint mare (23 years old, 14 hands, 700 lb or 300 kg) that needs to gain weight. Daisy spends most of her day in a stall (20 hours) and the rest in a drylot. She is fed orchardgrass hay (8-9 lb or 3.5-4 kg) two times a day, rice bran (1 cup two times daily), and a dried vegetable fat supplement for weight gain once a day. I tried switching Daisy to alfalfa to get more calories into her, but she came up lame in the front. I use her for lessons three or four times a week, and I am becoming more and more concerned about her weight. Her dentist sees no sign of obvious trouble, just an aging mouth. Help, please.

Answer

Because your mare is older and having trouble maintaining her weight, changes in her nutritional management might be necessary. Senior horses can have a loss of chewing ability without significant tooth loss or disease, and often they do not get as much nutrition from long-stemmed hay as they did when they were younger.

As a first step, consider introducing a processed forage source, such as chopped hay, hay cubes, or hay pellets, into her diet as these are easy for horses to chew and digest. Supplementing with grass hay pellets softened with water before feeding is a sound place to start. You should continue to offer some long-stemmed hay if there are no health concerns associated with feeding it (e.g., choke).

Further, because you are not offering Daisy a concentrate feed, think about adding a senior feed to her diet, particularly a senior feed that is also considered a complete feed (designed to partially or completely replace the forage portion of the diet). This may help simplify the diet as it can replace some of the long-stemmed hay and you would not need to feed hay pellets. If you choose to feed hay pellets, then a complete feed is not needed and you can choose a higher-calorie senior feed (look for 8-12% fat). Offering the senior feed three times per day would be best to keep the meal size small.

Finally, you may also need to reduce the amount of work, either the intensity or frequency, to help facilitate weight gain, particularly if Daisy continues to lose weight. Once weight gain is achieved, you may be able to re-introduce work, but vigilant monitoring of her weight should become a matter of habit in managing her.