Every horse care book you can buy will tell you, "Don’t feed your horses their hay on the ground." This is to avoid getting sand colic and picking up parasites from eating on manure-covered ground. Well, after seven years at this and having tried every type of feeder imaginable, we have yet to find a feeder that horses can’t — and won’t — fling their hay out of so they can happily eat it on the ground. We’ve been through rack feeders, bunk feeders, hanging feeders, you name it. It’s clear the horses have not read the horse care books.
Our most successful feeders to date — with success defined only as "keeping hay in" — are the same Rubbermaid tanks we use for watering the horses. They’re big, have deep sides, and have plenty of room for horses to sift through the hay and push it around while they eat. Horses are always sifting through their hay in search of something else … a finer selection, a fluffier stem of grass, who knows? And they especially like to toss their hay in the air, hoping something yummy will fall out.
But success is still relative. For instance, here are blind Kiowa on the right and blind Cactus Jack on the left. Notice the deep, 100-gallon water tank serving as feed trough. Notice the pile of hay flung onto the ground next to it. I took this photo yesterday afternoon while we were feeding.
Now, some horses are more insistent about flinging their hay onto the ground than others. We have one big old blind gelding, Shasta, whose main goal in life is seeing how fast he can toss the hay out of the trough.
Why it’s more appealing to eat hay on the ground I don’t know. But there are just some things you have to learn to accept (I guess). So every day, morning and evening, we dutifully fill the troughs with hay. As we walk away, we hear the first flakes of hay hitting the ground. Oh, well.
(Click on photo for larger image.)
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Update on Brynn: This morning her temperature was back to normal, at 100.8. And we didn’t do anything different. Go figure.
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