by Equine Info Exchange

We had a great opportunity to speak with Dr. Anna Dunaway, Equine Nutritionist from Purina Animal Nutrition, about the challenges people have helping their horses achieve and maintain a healthy weight, while balancing their feed choices with what makes sense economically for owners.

Dr. Dunaway travels around the country and helps owners with their specific needs. She explains, “When we enter a barn, we have the best interests in mind of the owner and their horses. We’re not there to sell a particular feed or supplement, but to understand help and address each horse’s unique needs.”

Here are her 3 quick wins owners can use to help their horses maintain healthy weight.

1. Select the right product

An owner may not be seeing an increase in weight, not because the product is bad, but perhaps they misapplied the product for the horse. If you have a high performance horse, are you choosing the right product? What can people do to choose the right product?

Read the package and descriptive support and look at the tag. For example, a tag which reads “Maintenance of Adult Horses” is not for high performance horses. If you feed 1-2 pounds a day, that is a ration balancer and is not meant to put weight on your horse. She recommends reading the purpose statements and directions. Dr. Dunaway has been writing content for feed tags for over seven years, helping guide owners to select the appropriate feed for their horses’ needs. She cautions that “Horses don’t eat feed tags” so the tags alone won’t tell you how the feed will perform for your horse.

To help choose the correct product, Purina has a Feed Finder tool! Try it!

2. Don’t think the cheaper feed will actually cost less to feed

There are a lot of false economies! Cheaper feed is not always cheaper to feed, especially if you need to add supplements for weight gain or retention. Most of the time, cheaper feeds are less expensive for a reason. When you buy a bag of feed which is a couple of dollars more, you may be getting a much better product. You may not need to buy costly supplements, your feed room will be less cluttered and there will be fewer feeding errors.

3. Good forage and preventing waste

Purina cares about the overall health of the horse and although this is not product related, Dr. Dunaway added that she often sees forage and hay waste as a big issue. Most barns she sees underestimate the amount of hay they throw away. She also sees that horses don’t eat poorer quality hay and it tends to get pushed around and wasted. Good forage is important in conjunction with feed. The poorer the hay quality, the more grain you will have to feed. She also advises farms to use a hay feeder as well since this simple step can reduce up to 50% of hay waste.

We know the challenges of horse ownership and Purina is supporting you for your horse’s good health. Have more questions? Let us know! Email us at info@equineinfoexchange.com.

About Anna Pesta Dunaway , Ph.D.

Anna Pesta Dunaway is a Nutritionist on the Equine Technical Solutions team at Purina Animal Nutrition. Her role includes bringing innovative solutions like the Equine MQ™ Platform from the research team out to the field. Dr. Dunaway’s Ph.D. research at the University of Nebraska focused on the use of high fat diets and manipulating the microbial community in the gut.

You can find more informative articles in our section on Health & Education.

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