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Horse Care and Comfort

Eating Wood and Sand??!

By:

LennyLlama

Date:

2013-Oct-07 at 07:37AM

One of the horses in which i go and train horses eats wood worse than a beaver... We originally had her in a paddock where a wooden roundyard was half built and there were large wooden posts in a circle. There are now no wooden posts left, just stumps of wood and the rest of the posts lying on the ground, literally eating beaver style! we now have her in a star picket and wire paddock, not wooden. she has now stopped this but did get sick at one stage as these posts had traces of poisons as they were treated pine. i was thinking she is lacking some nutrition? Maybe copper? And a few days ago we were about to go out and 2 other horses we noticed were just standing there just eating mouthfuls of sand. we put hay infront of them, even a hard feed and they wouldnt eat it, they just kept eating sand. we opened the gate so they would roam around eating grass around the property, i lead them out one by one and they literally trotted and cantered back to eat the sand!!!!! i know they must be lacking something like copper or iron? we do feed them a mineral mix called equimin.

beryl 2013-Oct-07 at 09:13AM

Mine use to do that when i first got them but now I've got them on top Spec Antilam so they get all their nutrients, they don't do it very often. They do have plenty of soaked hay so they get the fibre they need as well as restricted grazing.

I wouldn't go down the route of giving them a single element that you think they might need as you will be unbalancing their nutrition.

horses need fibre, they will chew bark off trees & eat twigs etc as they are browsers as well as grazers.
Ring a horse feed nutritionist for more advice.

vicci - UK (North Wales) 2013-Oct-07 at 12:14PM

Beryl is so right, they need fibre and singling out one mineral as a 'guess' can be dangerous. Fence posts have often been treated with preservatives and this can make them toxic so they definately need a different source of fibre! Monty wrote an interesting article on sand colic in Germany and how that was managed - if you do a searc on the Q and A tab it might be in there - can't remember when it was, anyone else got a better memory than me?! ;-)

Kleinne - Utah, U.S.A. 2013-Oct-07 at 01:47PM

Monty's sand colic article talks about the importance of wood in a horses diet because it removes sand from the digestive tract. He said we should always provide cut tree branches in a pile for our horses. Since reading this article I've followed this advice closely because we have very sandy soil here. In fact a few weeks ago I trimmed several trees around the property and threw them into the corner of my horses paddock. I thought to myself this should last her all winter long, it was a lot of tree branches. She had it all eaten in a week! I couldn't believe she ate all that in such a short amount of time. So if your horse is eating everything wooden they can find, it's because they need it. Provide them with safe wood so they won't eat the poisoned stuff.

vicci - UK (North Wales) 2013-Oct-07 at 03:44PM

Great Kleinne, I knew someone would remember it! ;-)

LennyLlama 2013-Oct-08 at 04:53PM

okay thanks guys for the tip! I will give it a try, we have LOADS of wood and trees around my area so ill give it a good go. Thanks, will keep you posted!