Coursera Equine Nutritional Course online – what I learnt.

A few months ago I heard about a free online Equine Nutritional course, run by the Royal (Dick) Veterinary School in Edinburgh. Although I’ve been feeding my own horses without issue for decades now, I thought it was worth a go, so I signed up, along, apparently, with over 22,000 other people around the world. Impressive!

The course was very thorough, and really interesting. It covered the gastro-intestinal tract in great detail, nutrient digestion, nutrient sources, dietary management, and clinical nutrition: condition scoring, feeding young, old, breeding, obese and malnourished horses, and particular attention was given to avoiding laminitis.

There were lectures every week for 5 weeks, lecture slides, discussion threads, and accompanying videos such as these:

Quite fun and informative video here

or a more technical version (if you can cope with the accent!) here

There was a weekly test (3 attempts allowed) followed by a final quiz, which was quite gruelling, but again, 3 attempts allowed, so no excuses! I’ll confess that it took me 3 1/2 hours to read through all my notes and then complete the final quiz with 100%, which is a lot longer than I expected it to take to answer 50 questions correctly. Of the 50, only about 10 were very easy, and some were quite fiendish!

There were some things I learnt which will definitely affect the way I feed my horses. I’m sure they’ll run a very similar course again, and I’d really recommend it, but if you don’t fancy it, these are the main things that I think are worth repeating. Some were a good reminder, others were quite a surprise to me.

Horses are NOT meal eaters, they are trickle feeders, designed to graze for 16-20 hours per day.

Their small (rugby-ball-sized) stomachs can’t expand, so, any ‘meals’ we feed them (for our convenience) should be small and frequent – a maximum of 1.5kg in a feed at any one time, of which no more than 1.25kg of cereal, for a 500kg horse. (If you feed more than that at one go, you risk undigested cereal ending up in the large intestine where it cannot be digested, and possibly causing the dreaded colic.)

The diet should be at the very LEAST 50% forage, however high the workload.

Water Soluble Carbohydrate levels in grass are lower after fertilising and after mowing/topping (because the grass is putting its energy into growing, not storing, and obviously stored WSC is what the horse eats). Stemmy older grass is high in WSC because it is storing it, rather than using it for growing. This surprised me a little, since long stemmy grass does not look very nutritious at all compared to younger green grass, but it makes sense. Stressed grass (overgrazed, frozen overnight, or in a drought) is a particular danger to laminitics. So, maintain young leafy swards – not mature stemmy pastures, by fertilising, rotate-grazing, resting, and topping your paddocks.

Although horses wouldn’t have oil in their natural diet, they can digest it very well… unlike cereals. Corn Oil is the most palatable, and it should always be introduced and increased slowly, at a rate of 100ml per week. You can feed 100ml per day per 100kg of bodyweight, so a maximum of 500ml a day for a 500kg horse. If you’re feeding a high-oil diet you need to add Vitamin E to the diet, at a rate of 100-150 iu per 100ml of oil. The benefits of feeding oil are that it increases energetic efficiency, improves athletic performance, enhances body condition, gives less excitable behaviour, and improves health. It is high-energy (twice that of oats) but slow-release.

I’ll be feeding a lot more sugar-beet, too, which is something I have always tailed off in the summer. It has a Digestible Energy level of almost 13 MJ/kg, very similar to that of oats, but is very digestible. It is digested in the hind-gut, and contains a lot of fibre. Perfect for horses! Our resident Eventing Vet did an article on sugar beet recently, HERE, which had already convinced me to change my feeding habits for my horses’ benefit.

So, the next time I need to add energy to a horse’s diet, I’ll be reaching for the oil, alfalfa, and sugar-beet, all of which are very digestible, and not the cereals. 

Finally, a couple of top tips for tempting fussy feeders – this was actually in the part about feeding very old and/or emaciated horses, but would apply to all. Pureed apple, or crushed ginger cookies, are very well received, apparently. Next time I have a fussy one, I’ll give that a go.

The course was really informative and well worth doing. Highly recommended. A big big thanks to all the tutors.

Further details of Coursera are here.

Of course, you don’t have to do horse-related study… I’m seriously considering this one next!