Fast Forage Switches Not Recommended for Horses

Understanding the inhabitants of the horse’s gut makes it easy to grasp the importance of making dietary changes slowly. The quantity and type of microbes living in the gut will be determined by the type of forage being eaten. It takes different microbes to ferment and break down grasses than it does legumes. Loose stools and digestive upset are common results from making a fast change in forage type, such as switching from a timothy grass hay to a legume hay like alfalfa. There will simply not be enough of the correct type of microbes available to help with fermentation and the horse’s health will suffer.

“Loose stools are a sure sign that the colon is not doing its job of reabsorbing water and forming the stools,” says Kapper. “That is why the prebiotics are recommended to help whenever the stools become soft or loose enough to cause diarrhea. Because we are dealing with the health of the microbes in the colon, a ‘treatment’ level should be administered for five additional days after the stools become normal. Prebiotics are a ‘food’ to help the microbes stay healthy, grow, and multiply, and are colon-specific as opposed to probiotics. The majority of the probiotics will not make it into the colon.”

Discuss your options with an equine nutritionist to help choose the right product for your horse.

Forage is the bulk of the horse’s diet. To keep your horse’s microbes happy, making changes to feed slowly is important, even more so for forage than grain mixtures.