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RE: [RC] [SPAM] [RC] Pounds of hay - heidi

If we're talking about hay only (not cubes or pellets) and if the hay does
indeed have 0.75% chloride, at the lowest sweating rates if they're never
going longer than 4 hours between eating and are always eating at least 8
pounds of hay for every hour riding, you're probably covered. If eating less
than that, or sweating heavier, you go into the negative zone and have to
play catch up.

Let's look at two different 50-mile ride scenarios--the slow ride and the fast 
ride.  If one takes the maximum elapsed time for a ride (which is difficult to 
do on most horses, on most courses), and one has 2 hours out for holds, one can 
subdivide the ride into roughly four 2.5 hour segments.  So even on the slow 
ride, the horse is only going 2.5 hours between "meals."  Except for extreme 
weather, this will likely be a minimal sweating scenario, since the horse is 
not producing as much excess heat as the horse going faster (although he also 
isn't generating as much external cooling, due to his slower speed).  Assume 
that the first and third checks are half an hour, and that the middle check is 
an hour.  He may be a bit shy of his eating requirements at 1 and 3, but if he 
is a good eater, he will make up for it at 2.  The worst offender here is 
vetting procedure that cuts into the horse's eating time--and the wise rider 
brings a flake of hay into the vet line!  This horse is likely also eating 
natural forages along the trail, as he 
isn't progressing very fast.  Also, in many of our desert areas, the dry native 
grasses tend to be high in e-lyte concentration relative to hay.

Let's make the "fast" scenario a 4-hour 50, just to make the math easy.  The 
horse will be sweating more, but he is only ONE HOUR between meals!  Even if he 
is sweating fairly copiously, he is quickly back to a source of feed, and if he 
eats well, will tend to stay on the curve fairly well.

Most of us are riding somewhere between these two extremes, but what you "lose" 
in increased time between meals you "gain" in working less hard and in being 
able to "snack" more enroute.

This does underscore the importance of forage as the primary feed source, 
though...

There's been a lot of discussion about the best way to feeding during a
ride, but not much along the lines of actually checking to back it up. It
would be very interesting to see how different feeding practices influence
them metabolically.

I think we already get a pretty good look at this on the trail--the voracious 
consumers of forage tend to be the horses who need little or no e-lyte 
supplementation, while those who don't eat well need more help.  Some of that 
falls under "feeding practices"--but some falls under how we raise our horses 
in the first place, and whether they learn (and adapt) as youngsters to being 
forage eaters, or whether they are "taught" away from that natural tendency by 
more "convenient" modern feeding practices.

Heidi

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