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Re: [RC] teaching a horse to drink??? - Chris Paus

Well, first off, congratulations to you for making a
good decision. You did what is right for your horse,
even if it caused you disappointment.

There could be lots of factors involved. I think
endurance riding can be very emotional for horses.
They want to run with the herd.They pick up the
excitement and electricity of the start. My experience
campaigner will not eat or drink much at all on the
first loop. By the second loop he's feeling thirsty
and will drink at every opportunity and eat grass at
every meadow.

One thing I see is too much alfalfa. If you read
SusanG's website you'll see that you are really
overloading the system with protein. You want to fill
her with lots of roughage.. this is where good grass
hay and beet pulp come in.

I teach distance riding and can always tell which of
my students feed a lot of alfalfa.. the horse has
sticky foamy lather instead of clear sweat. This isn't
as effective for cooling. The horses also seem to be a
little more on edge. A few years ago, a study was done
on race horses and alfalfa. They found out that the
horses with high alfalfa diets actually ran slower
than the ones with a traditional race horse diet of
grass hay and oats.

A little alfalfa is a good thing. It adds calcium to
the diet and that's an important element when the
horse is sweating and working. But it's one of those
things that is not good when overdone.

electrolytes should not cause a horse to stop
drinking. It should encourage the horse to drink.

When I got started in this sport, my horse refused to
drink.. I started adding powdered gatorade to his
water. It's not as good as regular equine
electrolytes, but he did drink the water which was
important.

I think you are on the right track, but just need to
tweak your program a little. Don't overfeed before a
ride. I don't really do much different before ride day
except increase the beet pulp and add some fastrack to
the mix. About a week before, I start feeding my horse
an handful of fastrack each day. That helps keep the
gut working well and digesting properly.

You might see if you can find a ride manager who wants
a "drag" or safety rider so you can take your horse to
a ride, ride behind all the others, and just get her
used to the activity and excitement of ride camp.
Usually CTRs use drag riders more than endurance
rides, but I've been on endurance rides where the
manager had them...

Take your horse on overnight campouts without
competition. Just get her used to the whole process of
eating sleeping and drinking in a strange place.

Hope this information helps!

chris
--- Elkenchild@xxxxxxx wrote:
My mare and I tried our first 25 this weekend, but
quit after the first loop, 
to my dissapointment. She had pulled off feed and
water in the morning, and 
showed visual gut cramping at VC. Though she only
scored a B, the vet said she 
needed to drink, and when she continued to refuse
feed and water I made an 
executive decision and scratched! Here are the
factor I've taken into 
consideration: she was over-excited about first
ridecamp experience, in-season, I fed her 
too much in the two days before the event, she had
been eating only the 
alfalfa out of our hay/alfalafa mix (because I had
been giving her so much hay), 
the electrolytes put her off water (does that
happen)? Any feedback would be 
great, and how can I teach her to drink strange
water in a strange place, if it's 
even possible! Thanks for the advice. We will be
trying again in a month or 
two!

Laura
"Not all who wander are lost." (jrr tolkien)



=====
"A good horse makes short miles," George Eliot

Chris and Star

BayRab Acres
http://pages.prodigy.net/paus
============================================================
You don't have to be a 100-mile rider or a multi-day rider to be an
endurance rider, but if you want to experience the finest challenges our
sport has to offer, you need to do both of those.
~ Joe Long

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[RC] teaching a horse to drink???, Elkenchild