Are we feeding our horses like cattle? Most horse owners of laminitic/ overweight/ EMS or Cushing prone ponies will be actively involved in managing grazing and restricting turn out aware of the fact that grass and hay contain water soluble carbohydrates in the form of simple sugars compromising of sucrose, glucose, fructose and also fructans which may trigger an attack. They may also be aware that sugar content tends to vary depending on the seasons and weather conditions and as such owners spend a great deal of time selecting ‘safe’ grazing times to avoid a sugar overload. Clearly horses are designed to eat and digest grass but are also foragers of shrubs and herbage a fact that many of us over look, many of our UK native breeds are also designed to thrive in harsh conditions on inferior pastures, is it possible therefore in our modern stabled and rugged environments to find ‘safer pasture’ or have some kind of accurate way of calculating sugar intake depending on what type of grasses are grazed so that owners can have greater peace of mind are not continuously battling with their horse’s grazing habits. With a view to finding safe pasture Bangor School of Chemistry has been investigating the sugar content of some of our so called inferior native species of grass compared to the more modern and most popular grass sown in the UK which is Perennial Rye which compromises a whopping 86% of grass seed sales. Since 2005 Perennial Rye grass has been bred to have a high (80%) content of fructan whatever the weather or other environmental conditions, this makes sense to the dairy farmer who wants a high milk yield in the most economical way without feeding large quantities of hard feed, but makes it hard for horse owners who have been under the impression fructan levels can vary and there may be safer times to graze horses. The idea behind the development of the high sugar rye-grass varieties was that the rumen bacteria tend to preferentially metabolise the fructan leaving more amino acids available to travel through to the hind gut to be absorbed by the cow resulting in better weight gain and better nitrogen use efficiency in the animal, but making this grass type entirely unsuitable for native horses/ponies. 20 years ago perennial rye contained 55% fructose, still too high in sugar for the native pony but considerably less than the modern variety.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:40:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015