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The big fat feeding challenge Slimmer, healthier horses are high on Dengie’s senior nutritionist Katie Williams’ wish list for 2012.
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besity will continue to be one of the big issues in 2012 - particularly its relationship with recurrent laminitis in horses and ponies with EMS (equine metabolic syndrome]. The challenge facing retailers and manufacturers is how to convince owners of overweight horses and ponies that they still need to feed them – obviously with the right products - to maintain health and wellbeing. Dengie is ideally placed, with its range of lowcalorie fibre feeds, to provide overweight horses with plenty of chew time to maintain a healthy gut, in particular helping to reduce the risk of gastric ulcers, which can affect any horse on a restricted fibre intake. In fact, now that more vets have long enough endoscopes to examine horses’ stomachs, gastric ulcers look like becoming an increasing problem. I don’t think there has been a sudden increase in the number of horses with ulcers -it’s just that now we can see they have ulcers! Again, Dengie products can be particularly useful because alfalfa is a natural buffer to acidity and, being a fibre feed, it helps to promote more chewing and therefore more saliva production, which is the horse’s natural regulator of acidity. My hope for 2012 is that even more horse owners will start to value fibre as a source of energy and other nutrients - and not feel that they have to Katie Williams: wants fibre valued as a source of energy. use mix and cubes!
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EQUESTRIAN TRADE NEWS FEBRUARY 2012
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