Free-Choice Feeding is Not the Answer to Equine Obesity

The advice to allow free access to food for an obese horse is doomed to failure. Too much food is how they got that way in the first place. Things like age, metabolic rate, and activity level can influence what calorie requirements are, but it still boils down to too many calories in versus calories burned. The same is true for overweight cats, dogs, and people.

Obesity comes from overeating. With overweight glucose-sensitive horses, the diet has to have both controlled sugar and starch plus controlled calories.

Let’s look at some of the claims floating around:

Claim: Horses need to be able to eat 24/7 because that is what they do naturally.

Fact: The only reason “natural” horses on pasture spend so much time eating is that grass is about 80 percent water. On a calorie basis, even low-sugar and starch hay has approximately 450 to 500 percent more calories per mouthful than fresh grass.

Claim: Restricting forage leads to weight loss that is mostly muscle, as well as raging hormones, oxidative stress, leptin resistance, and even pituitary pars intermedia dysfunction (PPID) or Equine Cushing’s Disease.

Fact: Where is the proof that any of the above is true? There is none. For example, long-standing research has clearly shown the stress hormone cortisol is higher when horses are fed than when they are restricted from eating. Controlling access to food does not increase any hormones or cause oxidative stress, or Equine Metabolic Syndrome (EMS). Weight loss that is mostly muscle never happens unless all body fat has already been burned.

There’s much, much more in equine research literature.

Does the horse need constant access to food to avoid being mentally and physically traumatized? Absolutely not. Horses with a healthy body weight restrict their food naturally and do not eat 24/7. The leptin resistance and increased appetite that makes EMS horses overeat has nothing to do with how often food is available. There is strong evidence EMS is an inherent metabolic type, determined by genetics. Allowing them to indulge will never make it go away.

Returning horses to their natural state is the argument given in favour of free-