To Eat or Not to eat: Relation Between Feeding and Equine Behaviour and Welfare

To eat or not to eat: Relation between feeding and equine behaviour and welfare

Horses have been evolved to spend a considerable amount of time to forage: 12-16 hours of the 24-hour cycle are common for feral horses in moderate climates. In natural environments the average feeding cycle is 2-3 hours foraging followed by an hour of resting. Obviously this is largely depended of many factors (sex, age, season, food availability and - quality, body condition score, physiological state etc.). Since the domestication of the horse, roughly 6000 years ago, husbandry and management of the horse has gradually deviated away from the natural needs of the horse.
Currently, the majority of horses (in the western world) experience husbandry practices in which the availability of recourses (social, food, possibility to move freely) are not in line with their ethological needs: many horses are kept for leisure, competition or racing, are confined in a solitary stable a large proportion of the 24 hour cycle. Many horses have to adapt to the time budget schedules of their keepers and the management of their needs is mimicking the human habits.
Especially feeding practices are seriously deviated: batch feeding instead of ad libitum feeding; (very) limited possibilities of locomotion during foraging; often domestic horses are daily exposed to long periods without edible food; high fiber, low starch diets are replaced by high starch low fibre diets; year round foods with a low water content and a different nutritional profile are provided; huge options to choose from an almost endless variation in foodstuffs (grasses, herbs, woods, fruits, rhizomes and even fish or minerals) are replaced by uniform fodder of a few grasses with pelleted additives without options to select; seasonal variations in body condition scores are weakened or absent; mainly feeding on ground level limited possibilities to experience social facilitation and even in most “social” solitary stables contact with conspecifics while foraging is very limited, to name a few. […]