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Fats and Carbs in primitive places



I've been reading the discussion on training and racing diets with various
forms of bewilderment, awe and wonder....and thought I'd drop in some
different variables just to make life interesting.

Here in Egypt our horses get either unrolled (my lucky folk get it soaked)
barley and whatever is passing for green at a particular season...right now
that's a form of lucerne, and later it will be another type of lucerne if I
can find it and young sorghum stalks if I can't.  Some people add corn or
dried fava (otherwise known as 'horse') beans to the diet as well. There are
also locally produced pellets that are made up of said lucerne, some barley,
some corn, and various minerals.
And that's it.  No hay is available at all.  We do get bran and rice straw
chopped up in tiny pieces, and carrots (in the winter) are wonderfully
cheap, as are sweet potatoes in summer.

As someone who is trying to find ways of getting endurance going here in one
place that it really should be, I'm wondering about the nutrition for our
horses.  We have cart horses in Cairo that put many, many miles each day at
a jog and trot on such a diet, and some of them actually look good.
Obviously, I'd like to have the best for my horses, but there ain't no
brewer's yeast readily available here, much less some of the more exotic
ingredients (maybe if I scrape a bunch of bumpers for the chrome?).  So how
would our horses' diets stack up? Since equinely speaking we are about a
century behind, we still have some of the working endurance types, but
they're not in as good shape I bet as in the States.
Really curious,
Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
gabbani@starnet.com.eg




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