Keeping Your Senior Horse Healthy
When it comes to feeding your senior horse, you want to make sure they have nothing but the best. This is critical when keeping your older horse in perfect health. After so many years with you, a senior horse has become a valued member of your family and you will do everything to ensure their wellbeing. This means giving them quality feed every day, making sure they are happy, full of energy, and comfortable for the rest of their years.
There are different definitions of what exactly a “senior horse” means. One of the most obvious changes, when your horse becomes a senior, is that it loses the ability to properly chew its hay or pasture. It is at this point that you must consider feeding your horse something different, ensuring they remain well-fed with all the important nutrients and vitamins that keep horses strong. One of the earliest signs that a horse is no longer chewing their food properly is something called quidding, which is when they spit out chunks of unchewed hay. If you begin to notice this, talk to your veterinarian about your horse’s teeth, then adjust its diet so that it continues receiving an ample supply of fibre.
What Foods Can I Feed My Senior Horse?
Asides from specialized senior horse feeds, which we will discuss in a moment, there is a whole range of healthy foods you can begin feeding your senior horse to keep them healthy. Alfalfa is one of the most popular options. Alfalfa pellets are a huge source of fibre, which is critical to keeping your horse’s weight at a healthy level. Alfalfa is great for older horses because they don’t need to do much chewing. You can even soak the alfalfa in water to make a sort of mushy porridge for your horse, like a fibre milkshake. You can add diet balancers to the alfalfa to complete the meal with amino acids, vitamins, and minerals.
Beet pulp is another source high in fibre and in calories that is easy to digest. Although beet pulp is not a balanced meal by any means, it serves the same function as the alfalfa, boosting the intake of fibre and calories for your horse. It can be mushed with water in much the same way the alfalfa can, allowing you to give shredded beet pulp or beet pulp pellets to your horse in a wet paste.
Soy hulls are another great alternative since they too are high in digestible fibre. If you are purchasing horse feed for your senior, make sure there are soy hulls in the ingredients. These are an excellent addition to any feed and are not generally eaten alone.
What Can I Feed My Senior Horse for It to Gain Weight?
If you need your senior horse to gain a little weight, the best thing you can do is make sure the horse has a full diet of minerals, vitamins, fibre, and protein. These are the best ingredients for gaining weight. While you are able to use lots of alternative food methods like alfalfa or beet pulp to encourage proper health, you also want to begin feeding your horse a special feed for maximum weight gain. The feed will complete the horse’s entire diet since it is designed to maintain the stability of your horse’s guts while providing lots of fibre, energy, amino acids, protein, vitamins, and minerals. Most will also come with probiotics and prebiotics to keep the horse’s stomach pumping properly. These feeds can almost always be smooshed into a paste-like mash for easy eating, as many older horses simply don’t have the teeth for chewing.
We recommend Purina Equine Senior Active for the most rapid and natural weight gain with a senior horse. While there are many products specifically designed for senior horses, this one is better suited to gaining weight. It combines the most critical components to a weight gain diet, including things like vegetable oil and rice bran. The feed comes high in fibre and fat while being low in sugar and starch. It even has Vitamin E to boost your horse’s immune system. Like the other senior feeds from Purina, you will need to mix the Equine Senior Active with pasture and hay for the best results, since this is not a complete diet.
The main difference with Equine Senior Active, as opposed to the original formula, is that this version is better for horses that are active and in need of weight gain since it contains so many calories that come from fat and not from sugar.
What Do You Feed a Retired Horse?
The best possible feed, according to thousands and thousands of horse owners and trainers across the globe, is Purina Equine Senior Horse Feed. This feed comes developed by some of the top equine nutritionists in the world, meant specifically to add health and happiness to ageing horses. The nutritionists have taken everything from the previous senior horse feeds, added the newest advances in equine nutrition, and produced this great feed.
Purina Equine Senior Horse Feed is a forage built-in feed, meaning that you can use it to either completely replace the hay in the horse’s diet or just partially replace it. The decision is yours, depending often on what kind of dental issues your senior horse may be suffering. The feed comes with exclusive probiotics for the upkeep of your horse’s immune system, while the ingredients include a special blend of rice bran, flaxseed, vegetable oils, and more. This formula ensures your ageing horse is going to look handsome for the foreseeable future. It also helps your horse maintain its proper weight.
When you need a feed for your ageing horse, be sure to look for the Purina Equine Senior Horse Feed. This is the right stuff to keep your old friend shiny, happy, well-fed and full of energy. This feed is digestible, fortified with vitamins and minerals, complete with antioxidants, and widely available anywhere you can purchase horse feed.