This article first appeared in the September 2021 digital edition of Equestrian Life. To see what's in the current issue, click here.

Hold your horses: Feeding for coolness

By Ellie Jolley

Whether your horse works at a high-performance level or spends most of their time as a paddock ornament, it’s important to understand how to maintain their required energy levels through their feed. Overfeeding unnecessary types of feed not only becomes expensive, it can also lead to your horse having more energy than you know what to do with!

WHAT WE MEAN BY ‘COOL’ & ‘HOT’ FEEDS

If you’ve been around horses for a while, chances are you’ve heard people talking about feed as having “cool” or “hot” characteristics. But this has nothing to do with temperature! This technical term used for horse feed is all about the energy output that a horse has as a result of what goes in their mouth. If you feed your horse a hot feed because you need them to have enough energy to clear that double or ace that passage, then you can expect them to be nicely full of beans. Conversely, if you have your horse on a cool diet because you’re doing some pretty chill activities, then they should be as cool as a bean.

However, if you are finding your horse has too much energy for you, how do you go about adjusting their feed to a cooler option in the most efficient and safest way? Equine Nutrition Assistant for Hygain, Holly Mills, explains that finding the perfect balance of energy for your horse comes down to several factors, not least of which is that each horse is different. “At the end of the day, every horse is an individual,” says Holly, “and every horse will react differently to different types of feeds. It can be hard to actually label a feed ‘cool’ because you might have that one-off chance that the horse will not necessarily be cool on it. And potentially, that is just that horse’s nature and not the feed at all...."

Read the full article in the September 2021 issue of Equestrian Life magazine here.