The Metabolic Reset
Winter is a great opportunity for your horse to lose some weight and get metabolic reset. What is this you ask?
Horses fueling on high fiber, winter forage.
Free living feral horses have to work hard to survive winters that are often cold, and have a shortage of rich, easily digestible forage. The horse is perfectly designed to fill a niche with high fiber forage and does not have to move (migrate) to new ranges in search of better food to survive when times get tough. They simply increase the size of their ranges to add resources. Yes, the ones that are not thriving are often predated on or die, but in normal years, most do make it to spring. This is how they have been doing it for thousands of years. Horses are perfectly designed to fuel themselves on mature, high fiber, standing dead forage while roaming in the wilds. They are hindgut fermenters and are partnered up symbiotically with a rich and diverse population of gut microbes that live in this hindgut and produce tremendous amounts of heat as they break this roughage down for the horse’s nutritional requirements. This makes for a great furnace that helps to keep the horses warm in harsh winter weather. Unlike a ruminant that relies on higher volumes of easy nutrients, the horse will just increase the amount of roughage he consumes in hard times, if it is available.
Horses being roughed off in cold winter. Here, only the ones in hard work have been blanketed.
This natural behavior that includes food scarcity and poor feed quality, enables the horse to lose weight over the winter months, give it’s pancreas a break from high sugar spring and summer feeds and thereby assist with, and prevent insulin resistance. This disease simply does not exist in a natural, feral way of life.
The benefits of this is that in the spring, when the first flush of very nutritious and high in sugar plants begin to grow, the horses are more readily able to process them. “Wild” horses have huge energy requirements at this time of year as they come out of winter underweight, and in spring are engaged in biologically energy expensive activities such as mating, fighting for the right to mate, foaling and nursing newborns. Our domestic buddies are often well fed throughout the winter months and thereby well fleshed. They also have not had a “metabolic reset” as their free living relatives have had, so are now at a much bigger risk of developing problems like IR and laminitis on spring pastures.
Some ideas that may help with these well fed, domestic critters is, when possible, to refrain from blanketing and ensure that they have ample, dust free, low sugar, high in fiber hay (maybe access to some supplemental straw?) or standing dead grass available at all times. It is important to make adjustments on an individual basis and to get your hands on them regularly to check their weight so that you can make adjustments accordingly. Ensure free access to quality loose salt and minerals along with water to encourage adequate hydratiuon, avoiding impaction in cold weather. Supplement with richer feed only when necessary.
Horses fleshing out on rich, spring grass
Nature perfectly choreographs the forage quality with the seasonal nutritional needs of the horses. We can learn plenty from observing horses in their natural state and using this knowledge to try and modify how we keep our domestic herds, best mimicking these natural scenarios’ as closely as possible.