I'm not an expert. My card is quite clearly in the amateur deck. I've never claimed to be an expert, and honestly, even if I felt comfortable calling myself one at any point ever, I probably wouldn't.
But I have dedicated a large part of my free time to research. Getting Baby Maxwell kicked my butt into overdrive on finding out everything that I could about equine nutrition. I've still got a LONG way to go. I will never be done learning, because things change, new products arrive, new studies are done, etc. But I like to think I have obtained quite a good start in the nutritional world of horses. A good understanding of horse nutrition can be the difference between ribs and fat. It really can.
Anyways, today I'm going to focus on hay. Why? Well because that's what got my blood boiling this weekend. You see, I've gone through several different hays for Maxwell over the last 7 months. Every horse is different. Every horse is an individual, just like people. Each horse's body requires something different. What works for the first 10 in your barn, won't work for the next 5. What works for the 22 horses in your barn, might not work for a single one in mine. It really matters that much. That's why most people are never really happy with feeding arrangements in many large boarding barn operations. They either don't have the time, the money, or the brains to realize that many different needs may need to be met. Anyhow....let me start off by telling you to look back at the beginnings of this blog, as I struggled to figure out what worked for Max. It took months. It took much fine tuning. It will always be touched and tweaked as his needs change, as the weather changes, and as his work load changes.
Please note first and foremost that my horse is fed hay on a free choice basis. I will never go back to traditional hay meals.
When Maxwell first came to me, I placed him on the barn hay, which is a Timothy/Orchard/Alfalfa blend. I supplemented him with a few flakes of alfalfa for weight and ulcer prevention. I soon found that not only was this not his favorite hay combination, but he would much rather poop on the alfalfa hay than eat it! WHAT?! Poop on crack? No way! So I simply tried again with something else. I replaced the alfalfa hay with alfalfa pellets. Instant hit. Those are his most favorite thing in the entire world. Because he is still receiving free choice forage, I was okay taking away a little bit of long stem forage and replacing it with pellets. Anything to get the calories into him, the alfalfa into him, and to see him thrive.
Months of peaks and valleys. Weight doesn't show up over night, especially in a Thoroughbred going through some pretty extreme body changes. One day he was an athlete in prime condition. The next? He was expected to sit around and do nothing for a while. The metabolism doesn't just stop because the horse does. A little more trial and error on the hay, and I realized I wanted to try something else.
Chatting with a trusted friend put thoughts of coastal in my mind. Up until this point I was pretty anti coastal. I didn't know why, aside from the stigma surrounding it's link to impaction colic. I knew many boarding barns refused to even let it be on the premises. Prior to getting Baby Maxwell, when I was on my search to find a new horse, I even came across a Thoroughbred organization that refused to adopt to anyone who had coastal hay fed on their property. But you know what? Many of this trusted friend's horses thrived on it. It is so widely available here. The price is attractive. What you people who aren't from my region of the south don't realize, is things like timothy/orchard blend hays run you $15-18 a bale. That's not even the really NICE stuff. Alfalfa will cost you over $20 a bale. It's not because I COULDN'T afford to feed these hays that I switched, but simply because I didn't see the results in my horse that I wanted to. After learning more about the coastal/bermuda/tifton varieties of hay, I felt much more confident feeding it to my beloved Max.
Let me stop here and explain something to you.
Impaction colic can happen to any horse for any reason. ANY colic can happen at any time for any reason. Many of the studies done on impaction colic as it relates to coastal type hays don't really hold much merit because the studies were done in predominantly coastal fed areas (southeastern regions) so the fact that all the horses were eating coastal does NOT in fact mean that coastal has a higher incidence of impaction. Anyways, I'm not here to argue that point. The fact of the matter is this:
When fed on a free choice basis, with attention being made to the amount of water a horse is consuming, coastal can be a valuable, economical tool in your horse's diet. The free choice offering keeps mobility in the stomach. The constant influx of forage into the gut keeps everything moving, just as the horse's gut was designed to do. It's when a horse is fed a large single meal of coastal at one time that perhaps an issue could arise. The stomach movement stops. Whatever was last to enter the gut gets stuck because now it's not moving anywhere. The next influx of forage/food comes in several hours later at dinner, and guess what, folks? We've got a clogged pipe.
The other thing to remember is how important water is to digestion, particularly in the horse. I feed Maxwell table salt on top of his grain twice a day. This keeps him a little thirstier than he would otherwise be. It keeps his water intake up, which can only help his gut, and in turn, helps his gut keep moving hay and other food through.
There is a place for coastal. Some horses should not eat it, particularly if they've had gut issues or colic in the past. It's important to make sure your horse's teeth are in good shape, so that he can chew and process that finer stem to help it pass through with ease (that goes for ANY food guys....get your horse's teeth done each year! PLEASE)
Anyhow. The whole reason I went on this tirade today is because over the weekend I was essentially told that I didn't care about my horse because I offer him free choice coastal/bermuda hay. That I must have a death wish because why would I feed my horse such an awful product? That my horse didn't look to be in great health anyway, so how could I say that this was the right choice for him?
Really?? REALLY?? How many hours of research have YOU done on YOUR horse's nutrition? OH! THAT'S right! You simply heard through the grapevine that coastal causes impaction and made the assumption that I must be wishing death on my beloved horse because I feed it.
I'm not an expert.
But I'm not an idiot either.
It really looks like I want my horse to die, right. It really looks like he's NOT thriving right now, right? RIGHT? Yeah, didn't think so.
Moral of the story is this:
Don't open your mouth and try to give your opinion when A) It wasn't wanted and B) I actually do have a bit more knowledge than I let on, and you're making an ass out of yourself trying to tell me otherwise.
So yeah. I feel coastal. I feed it in a tub. I feed a bale a day. Does that make you lose sleep at night? Well it should, because my horse is happy and thriving, and your opinion has nothing to do with it.
