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It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. Enter Password Confirm Password. Strength indicator. Subscribe to our Horse Health enewsletter and receive the latest on horse health care, disease, and the latest research. Regardless of the change to his lifestyle the now former racehorse still requires a diet that contains the right balance of nutrients not only to keep him healthy but to enable him to build new muscle for being a riding horse and possibly a competition horse.
The diet comprises fibre, protein, carbohydrates and fats along with vitamins, minerals and trace elements. All are important for health and well being. You should follow the same rules of feeding of any horse so you take into account workload and temperament, and any presenting clinical issues, as well as the matter of increasing general bodyweight.
The racehorse is an athlete so carries no excess fat just pure racing muscle. As this muscle drops away because the race training has ceased your horse can appear underweight until he begins to gain condition bulk from his new diet. A prebiotic provides a food source for gut flora and also clean up any pathogenic types of bacteria whilst a probiotic is a yeast culture which actually contains live yeast cells which serve to keep the environment in the gut healthy for the friendly bacteria to work in.
Fat is an attractive alternative energy source for racehorse rations, supplying a large number of calories in a concentrated form.
Even though horses do not consume large quantities of fat in the wild, they are able to digest fats efficiently, particularly vegetable oils. Most vegetable oils contain long-chain carbon unsaturated fats. These fats are liquid at room temperature and are used extensively as human foods for cooking and salad oils.
High levels of oil intake should be reached slowly, however, since some horses may develop loose, greasy feces when switched to a high-oil diet too quickly.
The energy density of vegetable oils is quite high, averaging about 2. Vegetable oil has about 2. Because of its high digestibility, fat is a very safe energy source. Even if some oil escapes digestion in the small intestine, it will not cause major disruptions of fermentation in the hindgut since bacteria cannot ferment long-chain oils.
Highly Fermentable Fiber. An interesting alternative energy source for performance horses is beet pulp, a byproduct of the sugar beet industry, made by drying the residual pulp after the sugar has been extracted. It contains a high percent of fermentable fiber, and its DE content is similar to oats. The amino acids from this extra protein are broken down by the liver, and the nitrogen from the protein is excreted as ammonia.
Excessive protein intake should be avoided in the exercised horse for a number of reasons: 1 water requirements increase with increased protein intake; 2 urea levels increase in the blood leading to greater urea excretion into the gut, which may increase the risk of intestinal disturbances such as enterotoxemia; and 3 blood ammonia increases cause a number of problems such as nerve irritability and disturbances in carbohydrate metabolism.
Increased ammonia excretion in the urine may also lead to respiratory problems because of ammonia buildup in the stall. Racehorse Feeds. Those who sponsor racing may soon need to show that the costs horses pay for the sport are mitigated and justified. As part of this process, the industry may wish to benchmark incremental falls in the prevalence of gastric ulceration and oral stereotypies across the racing horse population. University home. Current students. Staff intranet. Type to search.
All content. How to feed a racehorse and keep it healthy. Study veterinary science at Sydney Find out more. Vivienne Reiner. Media and Public Relations Adviser Health.
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