Assess your horse’s overall diet, nutrient needs, health status, and workload before supplementing him. | Photo: The Horse Staff

Assess your horse’s overall diet, nutrient needs, health status, and workload before supplementing him.

Horse owners are passionate about their animal’s diets–sometimes too passionate–and this feed-focused love can be wasteful at best and detrimental to their charges’ health at worst. Over the past couple of years, researchers have published several studies proving that many owners overfeed and oversupplement their horses. For example, a group of researchers from Virginia Tech recently reported that 51% (153/300) of horses residing in a closed herd were overweight or obese. In another diet-related survey, scientists from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and the University of Maryland found that top-level three-day event horses were oversupplemented, receiving an average of four nutritional supplements daily.

Because of the domestication of horses, along with modern management realities, the amount of food these animals consume is almost completely under the owner/caretaker’s control. With this in mind, our goals in this article are to remind horse owners, trainers, and managers about key factors to consider when supplementing horses and to provide some tips for doing so horses wisely.

More: Greater, Additional, Further

Nowhere does the Webster’s New World College Dictionary list “more” as a synonym of “better.” However, many owners fall victim to the false assumption that the more vitamins and minerals they add to their horses’ diets, the better