2014 AGM Speaker Dr. Catherine Delesalle-How to Fuel Your Friesian Horse; sponsored by the Fenway Foundation for Friesian Horses

HOW TOFUEL YOUR FRIESIAN HORSE.

This talk will take you on a journey through the evolutionary history of the horse, which is necessary to better understand the digestive physiology of the horse. We will talk about why horses are so sensitive to develop colic in a domesticated setting. Because colic is for sure not the number one cause of death in horses living in free nature. If you want to understand how your horse assimilates food, you need to have a basic understanding of the build up of its GI tract and all its strengths and weaknesses when we apply meal feeding in domesticated horses. Because, in the end, that’s the key issue. Horses are made to eat troughout the day large amounts of low nutritional high quality roughage. Because we want to perform with our horses, we’ve added high energy ingredients to the diet such as oats, barley and maize. And we can do that without any problem if we respect some basic rules. We will talk about which pathologies can develop when horses are fed in the wrong way and we will talk about which key issues need to get attention when we feed sports horses. What can we use? Which ingredients are best to use for which type of exercise. And this all, of course, keeping in mind that the Friesian horse has its own way in functioning on a certain diet. Experience learns that this is not a copy paste story when we are looking at the average sport horse.

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