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Maintaining Weight On Our Senior Horses
(Especially Through The Winter)
Everyone enjoying our lovely New England winter? No? I can’t imagine why not! Could it be the freezing rain, ice storms wrecking havoc with our power lines, towering snow drifts or biting wind chill that has ruined your love of winter and fired up the desire to fly south? Just maybe! It is reasonable to say that it is darned cold out there, and for all you horse owners, this is a tough time of year. Taking care of a barn in the winter can be a pain in the behind – frozen water buckets, snow  drifts blocking doors, multiple blanket issues, power outages, and the list goes on. It’s a tough time for horses too, especially our senior horses.
We all worry more about our seniors during the winter. The ground is covered with ice and snow, giving arthritic horses trouble just walking across the paddock. Frozen water buckets may decrease water intake, leading to dehydration and possible colon impactions. It can also be a challenge to maintain a good weight on senior horses during the cold winter months. Seniors can be tough to keep the weight on anyway. Add in the increased calories needed to keep warm during the winter and many of these horses may lose weight. Layers of blankets and a thick fuzzy coat can make it hard to see the weight loss too. Many an owner finds themselves with an underweight horse come springtime. Then, of course, you spend all spring and summer building the weight back up, only to lose it again the following winter! So what can we do to help our seniors maintain a healthy weight throughout the year?
The first step is assessing their physical health. Parasites, poor dental care, chronic pain or infections can all wear down on a horse, making it difficult to properly digest and use the energy from food. Chronic issues such as arthritis or heaves may also decrease a horse’s appetite. Dental disease plays an especially important role in proper nutrition. Sharp enamel points or abnormal dentition (such as a wave mouth) can make it difficult or even painful to chew feed. What good is feeding high  quality grain or hay if half of it falls out of your horse’s mouth? Regular floating is a key part of maintaining your senior horse’s health. Your veterinarian should do a thorough physical including a dental examination to evaluate any concerns that may be keeping the weight off. A fecal examination to look for parasites is also recommended. Bloodwork may be needed to check for any underlying health concerns.
The next step is evaluating your horse’s environment and temperament. A “hot” or nervous horse may be easily stressed by aspects of his management and care, making it hard to relax and put on weight. Is he stabled next to or turned out with an aggressive horse? A timid horse may be chased away from food by a pasture mate. Does he have any turnout time? A horse with vices (such as weaving or stall walking) may actually burn more calories being stalled than standing out in a paddock. Is he a pasture pet or is he still ridden daily? Is he frequently trucked for shows or trail rides? All of these factors can impact your horse’s need for calories and affect their weight gain.
Finally, we need to evaluate their diet. This is where it can get a little tricky. There are many different approaches to putting weight on a horse, mainly because there are a variety of reasons why a horse is skinny. Try to remember that what works for your neighbor’s horse down the road may not work for your horse. It may take some tinkering to find a diet that works for your horse. You also don’t want to change the diet too quickly. Make any changes gradually over a week or two. It will take time to gain the weight back on any horse, so don’t expect the pounds to jump back on in 1-2 weeks. It may take 2-3 months of steady weight gain to build your horse back up. Be patient and use a weight tape to measure your horse every week to monitor the weight changes.
 Good quality hay is the best place to start. Horses were designed to eat lots of forage, so feeding free-choice hay is a great way to help a horse gain weight. Pasture grazing can help supplement some intake, but you can’t rely on it to provide adequate nutrition to replace hay. And of course, the pasture is buried under two feet of snow in the winter! If your senior is a little lacking in the dental department, other hay-like options are chopped hay or hay cubes, soaked in warm water. Beet pulp is another great feeding option. It is an excellent source of highly digestible fiber and highly palatable to many horses (once soaked in water for a few hours). It can be fed in relatively large amounts to provide sufficient fiber to dentally-challenged senior horse without upsetting a balanced diet. This has long been a favorite of many a horse owner for gaining weight.
A mature horse will eat 2-2.5% of its body weight daily, at least half of which is recommended to be hay or other roughage. An average 1,000lb horse on a hay-only diet could require 20-25lbs of hay daily and that is just to maintain weight. You obviously would need to feed more to a working horse to keep the weight on. Horses can only eat about 3% of body weight in dry matter per day, so there is a limit to the amount of hay a horse will be able to physically consume in a day. With skinny seniors, you also want to increase the caloric intake above and beyond that of hay. This is when you turn to other additives such as grains, pellets, sweet feeds, fat, etc for more calories.
 There are an almost unlimited number of options for adding concentrates (pellets, sweet feed, etc) to a senior’s diet. Take any company (Purina, Blue Seal, etc) and you’ll find a number of diets that can be used to help a senior horse gain weight, regardless of whether they are marketed for seniors or not. Some seniors do well on a complete senior feed, others need a high performance feed to get adequate calories. So what is the best diet out there? Well, it depends. It can depend on your horse’s health, their tastes, what brand/type of feed is available locally or what you personally prefer to feed. If your senior is at risk for Cushing disease or other metabolic syndromes, you may need to feed a low sugar/low starch diet. Chronic laminitis horses may need a low carbohydrate diet. Some horses refuse to eat sweet feeds or dislike the taste of certain grains. Another option for increasing fat and calories is vegetable oil. Most horses find it palatable and it adds calories without adding more bulk to a diet. It has the additional benefit of giving a little shine to their coats.
While everyone (usually) agrees that hay is the best thing for a horse, seemingly everyone has a different opinion on what and how much concentrates to feed. Some owners swear by sunflower seed/cracked corn/rolled oats diets that they mix themselves. Others love using a complete senior feed. I could go on for pages about crude protein content, glycemic index, non-structural carbohydrates, etc, but I would probably bore you and me to tears. Sufficient to say, it’s a complicated world of nutrition out there! The best thing I can recommend is talking with your veterinarian about your diet options. We can help you decide what is right for both you and your horse, and work together to formulate a balanced diet that will put the weight back on and keep it there.
I believe that every senior horse is a little different, so it’s hard to put out a blanket statement about senior horse nutrition. And it isn’t just about the diet. You need to look at the whole picture – your horse’s overall health status, environment, temperament, etc. Nutrition is such an important component of a horse’s care that it can’t be overlooked. We love our senior horses (even the cranky ones) and want them to have the best care possible year round. So, please keep a close eye on your senior horses this winter and talk to us if you have any concerns. If you would like to read a little more on this subject, please click on this link at TheHorse.com and follow the instructions to read the full article “Strategies for Keeping Weight on Horses.”
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