Various Shades of Green: Natural horse keeping, how we got it wrong.

Its a scary thing when you realise the rules have changed.
When all you thought was true is shown to not only be wrong, but in some cases harmful.

Me and Kim have always considered ourselves professionals when it came to horses.
We have the qualifications in our relevant disciplines, years of practical experience working in a wide range of yards, from veterinary to riding schools, racing to eventing, livery yards and hunter yards and all in between.
We've owned our own horses for years and learned the heartache and expense that comes with being the "Boss".
From time to time we've had other peoples horses to school or back.

Its not showing off.
I'm just trying to set a scene here.

Its been brewing for a while, this change.
We took the horses barefoot a few yeas ago and have been steadily learning all about this concept of natural horse keeping.
Through that we had read about track systems, a method by where you no longer use traditional paddocks for grazing, but instead adopted a series of tracks with varying going to keep your horse mobile and their (bare) feet in good condition, as they would in the wild.

We liked the idea, we understood the advantages.

But it was all abstract.
Something to do "One day."

The biggest myth buster came in the form on grazing.

Like many people in the UK (I can't speak for other countries), our system is made up of paddocks of varying grass. From lush to nearly bare earth, a system we thought was the way to do it.
We kept Mouse on the "diet" paddock nearly all year and Badger would join her for a few hours a day. Comet and Jo would graze the "in-between" paddocks with Comet maybe getting a couple of hours a day on the lusher stuff.

Sounds sensible right?

Everyones needs catered for, we thought we were doing a pretty good job.

So why was it all going wrong?

The trouble is that "bare" paddock was anything but.
Oh sure you were hard pressed to SEE any grass, but that was because the "fat" ponies spent all day nibbling at the tiny sugar rich shoots as they popped up.
Mouse actually has worn front teeth from grazing so low.
When you hold your hands up and exclaim "I don't know WHAT she lives on!" you don't realise that you are basically letting the fat kid eat burgers all day.
The diet paddock should really be re-names the "junk food zone".

The other problem with keeping grass very short is weeds.
The horse is only interested in grass so as the grass gets shorter, the docks, thistles, buttercups and clover get higher.
Before you know it you have a healthy crop of rubbish. (see pics 9, 10 & 11)

At the moment we have Mouse, Badger and Comet living in on full ration hay.
Mouse is totally zero grazing with only hay and her Top Spec anti-lam (a feed balancer which provides her with the essential minerals and vitamins she can't get from hay alone).
Badger is going out for 2 hours twice a day with the grazing muzzle on (see pic 1) and also gets hay and anti-lam.
Comet free grazes for 2 hours twice a day and gets a little less hay and a low release energy feed.

So wait a second....what grass are they eating?

Having done our homework we have gone against our educated selves and have given the boys a small paddock (@ 30, x 30') of very tall grass. (pic 4)
Its the kind of grazing I would have had a fit about letting them on at this time of year a few months ago. I was of the opinion that if your going to do that you may as well fence it off with police tape and call the vet ambulance!

But guess what.
After years of being told that horses like "pasture", no longer than a few short inches, we have discovered that this is..we;;..horse shit.
The boys happily chowed down on the long tough stems, spending time ruminating them and ignoring the lush grass. (pic 3& 5).
As they grazed I was surprise to see them CHOOSE the long stuff over the lush grass they uncovered.

After a couple of weeks we moved the boys to a new patch and they had left a perfect pasture of grass no shorter than 4" long and in patches much longer, proving that they preferred the long, almost dead, grass to the short sugar laden ones. (pic 8)
Its intresting to watch them graze.Before they where like eating amchines, constantly chewing as much grass as they could get, now they tend to take a large mouthful and raise their heads, chewing well until its gone before going down for the nexy mouthful.

This flies in the face of normal horse management.

But why is this?

Horses in the wild live in pretty hostile environments.
Think about the horses of the Mongolian steppes or the mustang's in the mountains and plains of America or even the truly wild equids like zebra in Africa.
These horses all evolved to eat the rough stemmy grass of these lands, ts what their guts evolved for.
We corralled our horses ancestors and changed their way of eating and exercising.
We took an animal meant to survive o the poorest of feed stuff and yet still travel 30 miles a day and we basically put them in a cell full of sweets.

The closest thing we have in fodder is hay, the second best thing is long grass.

The trouble is, while we can now control what our horses eat we have also had to take away the freedom they have been used to for so long.
We have always tried to keep them outside 24/7 in all but the harshest weather but now this isn;t an option.

This of course is where the track systems come in, but more about those as we make them!

Here's to working towards feeding our horses AND keeping our horses in as natural a way as possible!!
No more compromise!