Overweight horses, just like overweight people, are jeopardizing their overall health. Horses with weight problems can become more susceptible to injury, laminitis, breathing difficulties, and hormonal problem. Your horse needs to go on a diet.
The first step in setting up a weight-loss diet for your horse is to determine what your horse's ideal body weight is. This will be used to determine how much hay the horse should be fed. For safe but steady weight loss, if the animal is being worked daily, feed a minimum of 1.5% of his current body weight and 2% of his ideal body weight in hay. For a horse getting no formal exercise and confined to a stall or small paddock, feed between 1% of the current body weight to 1.5% of the ideal body weight. For example, assume our fat pony's current body weight is 700 lbs. and his ideal body weight 500 lbs. He's getting no formal exercise. We'd fed him between 7 and 7.5 lbs. of hay per day (1% to 1.5% of the ideal weight of 500 lbs.).
No Crash Dieting
If your horse or pony is already on a grain-free, reduced-hay diet that would make any other horse look like a rack of bones, but weight loss is slow, you may decide to cut feed even further. Don't do it.
Ponies, minis, donkeys and even full-sized horses whose weight problem is metabolic react to severe calorie restriction by becoming increasingly resistant to the effects of insulin and mobilizing large amounts of fat in an effort to "feed" their cells that way. The fat mobilization can be so severe that the blood looks milky and organ damage can occur.
If you're in this situation, go back to square one, determine your target weight, feed accordingly and make sure you allow no grain, grass or high-sugar hays. If you choose the diet correctly your horse or pony can eat a normal amount and still lose weight.
Hay's No. 1
The type of hay you choose is important. Hays vary tremendously in their calorie and sugar content. The bright green, tender, dairy-cow-quality cuttings of alfalfa lead the pack in calories. The stemmier alfalfas usually available to horse owners often contain the same or fewer calories than young cuttings of some grass hays.
In general, however, we recommend you avoid high quality alfalfa, brome, peanut hay, any crop type hay (e.g. peavine, soybean), the grain hays (wheat, oat, milo, triticale) and young, tender cuttings of any type. The best hays for weight loss are prairie hays, native meadow hays, and mature cuttings of Bermudagrass, timothy or orchardgrass.
