Most horses have some “down time” in winter, when adverse weather will not permit much riding or showing activity. A reduction in your horse’s activity level usually means a reduced need for calories, and requirements for grain or concentrate feeding can be lowered. During the winter season, temperatures typically fall below that necessary for pasture grass to grow. Pastures become rapidly depleted of natural forage and horses must increasingly rely on their owners to provide them with a nutritionally adequate diet. To properly feed a horse during the winter months the key factors of water, fibre, and essential nutrients must be addressed.

When the days start getting shorter, horse owners know that winter is just around the corner and it’s time to start thinking about winter feeding regimes. Feeding horses in virtually all parts of Canada during the winter months involves a need for increased energy intake because of cold temperatures and inclement weather. The amount of additional energy required by your horse will be even greater in extremely cold climates.

How many of us remember the days when the only way to find out the facts on a subject was to go to the library and look it up? Answers to questions we had about the care or feeding of our horses might have been found in one of the many reference books we all owned. Or, maybe we would find the information we were looking for by perusing the many equine magazines we kept “just in case.”

The advice to allow free access to food for an obese horse is doomed to failure. Too much food is how they got that way in the first place. Things like age, metabolic rate, and activity level can influence what calorie requirements are, but it still boils down to too many calories in versus calories burned. The same is true for overweight cats, dogs, and people.