DO DOMESTIC HORSES SELF-REGULATE:

For many years I’ve seen various romanticised articles claiming that horses will only eat what they need.

I think it’s important that this should be addressed once and for all, as it can cause harm to horses when owners believe inapplicable information.

As the honest truth is this just doesn’t happen in the vast majority of domestic equines ....but I can also see why some may think this may be the case.

This is because when we have domesticated animals of any kind, they stay in a permanent adolescent status and never fully develop a complete adult mindset, despite being fully grown physically.

This behaviour happens because domesticity changes an animal's development primarily. After all, humans take care of their needs.

So to understand this behaviour in human terms- it would be like asking a 5-year-old child to self-regulate between eating lollies or broccoli. You don’t have to guess which one they would choose... and our domestic horses are no different.

As they will go for SWEET over HEALTHY foodstuffs every time.

Whilst we see horses picking at a variety of foods such as browsing herbs, shoots, tree barks, fruits, nuts etc... this does not mean they are self-regulating.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to prove the lack of self-regulatory behaviour in equines, with one word of pasture-induced LAMINITIS. As we can see and read about thousands of horses all over the world eating foods that are bad for them, including sugary lush grasses and high calorie concentrates, that cause our horses to develop these deathly conditions such as Laminitis and other food-related issues, all brought about by gorging on these unsuitable foodstuffs.

It’s also why if you were to take the lid off your food bin and offer it to your horse that they would eat the lot!

As in everything!

He or she would not self-regulate in any way, shape, or form, hence where the saying comes from of “eating like a horse”.

Another myth in association with this that we also need to debunk is that horses know how much of say a mineral they need to eat to balance their nutritional needs.

Again this is not true of domestic horses, who rarely ingest the right amount of nutrients for health, especially if for example these items are left as free choice minerals or licks in the paddock, which is why they don’t work efficiently to meet all of your horse's nutritional needs.

There is no doubt that some horses enjoy licking at a mineral block, whilst other horses will eat a whole lick overnight and gorge on it like it’s a lollipop, and yet others won’t ever touch it ....yet we have seen veterinary blood studies showing these same mineral deficient horses to be lacking in the very minerals on offer in these licks, but the horses don’t eat it, which again clearly shows these stories of self-regulation cannot be relied upon for the health of our equine.

I personally think a lot of these myths were born from the witnessed behaviour of people studying feral/ wild/ undomesticated horses and then others misinterpretation of that being thought to be the same for our paddocked horses, which as we can see is not the case.

So, it is ONLY self-reliant feral/ wild/ undomesticated horses, that live on their own merits, who have had no human contact, that develop a genuine wild animal “self-regulation” which comes about through their previous experiences causing problems caused by over-eating or from eating the wrong foods etc, that threatens their very survival, which maps memory to make a permanent behaviour to avoid doing that again, hence why this group of horses develops the ability to self regulate.

Obviously, this is very different to the upbringing that the majority of the horses any of us have in our paddocks have experienced, who are rarely left foraging on 100+ wild acres with their families for several years while they grow and learn.

Therefore I would calculate that it’s this mix-up between wild and domestic behaviour that causes some to erroneously believe that self-regulation happens in domestic horses.

Some may see the occasional rare domestic horse displaying natural self-regulating behaviours like this, often if they have come from wild/feral stock such as with Mustangs/Kaimanawas/ Brumbies or their immediate descendants etc....but for the most part for 99.9% of us that is not going to happen.

So, the best way to address your domestic horse's nutritional needs is to offer a species-appropriate balanced diet including low sugar grasses, and hay, whilst providing a synergistically blended multi-mineral and vitamin formula in a daily bucket feed to make sure YOU regulate your horse's diet rather than relying on this mythic self-regulation.

Please see our link for more info on our Organic Minerals.

https://www.naturalhorse.co.nz/equine-supplements