HGG Community Forums

Congratulations! My first horse came 300 pounds underweight. Take before and after pictures, it's super rewarding to be able to look back and see how far your horse has come!

Congrats!

I don't know how experienced you are with refeeding an underweight horse, so please don't take this wrong. I just want to help, I promise. I did a lot of rescue work back in the day, brought back horses that even my vet told me were hopeless, and there are a few things that help with any underweight horse.

First and foremost, if your new girl is drastically underweight, please be very careful feeding her up. A starved horse has to be fed differently than one who is just a hard keeper if you want to avoid vet visits. It's very easy to colic a starved horse or even founder them by pouring the rich grain and alfalfa to them as we all want to do when we see them so thin and sad. Rich feed is the worst thing for a starved horse. I've known someone who lost a rescue within two days to colic, by trying to feed it the very best possible feed. :/

So yes, if your girl is especially skinny, start with feeding something bland close to what she's used to, usually a plain grass hay works best, and if she wasn't being fed much you'll need to break it up in several small meals a day instead of all at once. When she's had time to adjust to your hay, which will take at least a week (my vet always told me 7 to 10 days, depending how bad the horse was), you can start to increase the amounts gradually over the next month until she's getting free choice. Add grain to the diet the same way, starting with a couple cups of something bland like crimped oats and working her up to the sweet feeds that claim to do everything but brush the horse for you. Lol It may take a month to get her on full rations, but it will be a safer month instead of a month of vet bills from three colics or worse, an impaction surgery.

Another thing i really suggest strongly for you to do is feed psyllium with her grain or add in one of the 'sand blast' feed supplements for the first month you have her. A LOT of hungry horses have a large amount of sand in their system from eating anything and everything they could find, usually off the ground. I took in a little Arab cross mare one time who was refusing to eat much at all and so pot-bellied it looked like she was about to drop a foal even though she hadn't even seen a stallion in two years. I got my vet out, worried it was stomach cancer or something equally terminal, but my vet examined her and said he thought it was sand. He tubed her and had me give her a double dose of Sandblast every day, one little scoop morning and evening in her oats with molasses stirred in to make the supplement stick to the grain. That poor mare lost over a foot of width from her belly over the next month while gaining everywhere else and trying her best to eat all the hay ever. She had been carrying around so much sand in her gut that she evidently thought her belly was full! I talked to her old owner about it and it turned out that Ruby (the Arab cross) was always dumping her grain bucket and eating it out of the dirt, and evidently getting as much sand as feed. I fed in old cattle mineral tubs which are about two feet deep and sit on the ground, so that was never a problem for me.

And finally, see about getting your girl's teeth floated. Many horses that have been fed well who are still kind of underweight have hooks and points on the back teeth that keep them from properly meeting for chewing their food, which leads to it not processing properly. With you spending so much trying to put weight on her, you'll want to be sure she can chew and truly use all that hay and grain. :)

I have done it once before with another mare like her. I am getting her from a rescue. They have her up to 18 lbs of senior feed a day. Feeding 3 times a day. They are giving me all her vet work so that I can give them to my vet.
I am excited but nervous for she will be my oldest boys horse. He has always wanted a Tennessee Walking horse. He had a half walker half quarter horse when he was younger.
The rescue is just letting me have her because they and I think she will do better one on one. Her children show and they are gone most weekends. They have to put her in a stall that she hates and she paces real bad.
If you all want to follow our journey you can friend me on facebook. Dorothy Mann my profile pic is of me sitting on my mare Cinnamon and my oldest reaching up to pet her for the first time.

@JustaSaddletramp, he sounds exactly like the black TWH gelding I had! Maybe it's a black TWH gelding thing? :))

@JustaSaddletramp, I'm not even lying, the people we bought him from named him Hemorrhoid! Cuz you couldn't get rid of him! My grandmother used to throw mess at him and he wouldn't flinch. He'd just act like you did nothing. I swear he'd intentionally get his hoof/leg stuck in the hanging feed bucket for the attention he got while it was "unstcuked" . Double row electric fencing was nothing to him if he saw us. He'd just waltz right through it. He thought everything was climbable. Actually, that's why he isn't with us anymore. It was winter, and he apparently tried to climb the pig/hog panels and he and it fell (due to obvious reasons), and he was stuck there in the freezing rain and no one had noticed until they went out and checked to see how everything was fairing in the bad weather, and found him nearly frozen. My grandmother always said the poor fella would be the cause of his own death.

@JustaSaddletramp, I do. Sadly, I wasn't there when it happened, so I only get to imagine that I was there seeing him again, at least before it happened. I'm glad I didn't see him like that, but I hate that I wasn't living there, too. I hate that the poor fella basically laid there freezing, suffering, and pretty much didn't die until he was found, and they helped him to not have to suffer and freeze anymore.
Normally, they would've tried to save him, but they didn't know how long he'd been down, and they could tell he was barely alive. He was only 3 or 4 at the time, and broke to ride, and you'd swear nearly bombproof. He did anything you asked of him, and complained none.

@JustaSaddletramp, that is good to do! Though we lived on 20 acres, and the horses roamed the neighbor's (they let us use it) 100+ acre pasture. We used our actual part of it to house the hogs, and the horse/cow water trough, the horses and cows always thought the pig's food mixes were tasty, which is why some liked to live near the hogs during feeding. They had hopes of getting a free (stolen by them) snack! It was mostly bread and corn. And I'll tell you. Bread is like crack to horses! They love it so much.

@JustaSaddletramp, we always got free bread from the warehouses (?) [whatever's] throwing out the old breads. There'd be crates and crates of it. All kinds. Muffins and snack cakes, too. A lot of the snacks and muffins were still good for human consumption, and some of the bread, too. But most of it still got fed to the animals. Horses/ponies generally got 2-3 slices, chickens/ducks/geese got a bunch crumbled up. Each rabbit got one slice. Goats got a bit. Usually a loaf or two for the goat herd. Everything is crack to goats! :))

Wow! I am so happy for you! I hope that you are able to figure out how to put pictures on here! (Google photos works for me, and if the picture is on Facebook I can get it to show up on here)

Looks like you have lots of feeding advice, and you got it handled, but if for some reason you want to try something else, I can not recommend ThriveFeed enough. We use it for rescues, older horses, and the show horses. My trainers Mom rescues a lot and she loves the thrive feed as they quickly gain weight, and a beautiful coat without risk of them foundering from overfeeding.

When I was little my Mom has a tennessee walking horse. She used to sit me up in front of her and would go trail riding! Coincidentally the area where my college is.

I am so excited with you too as I feel kinda similiar, as I found a way to bring my girl to college with me! I haven't even seen her in about 8 months, or had her near me in 9 months!

I love horses with a big blaze. Ever since my crazy bald horse I'm starting to like a big blaze even more than I did!

Good luck to you!

Here's pictures with instructions

https://photos.app.goo.gl/3DfTdCKrmQGXbRYi6