Horse Behavior: Role of Nutrition Management

Common horse management practices of confinement and feeding a few large meals daily have been shown to cause digestive irritation. Horses typically managed in this manner generally exhibit the highest incidence of behavioral problems.

Excessive excitability in horses has often been blamed on high-carbohydrate diets, although this claim has not been shown experimentally. Increasing the amount of fat relative to soluble carbohydrates as the primary source of energy in the diet may reduce reactivity of horses on high-energy diets.

Commercial supplements containing amino acids, B-vitamins, and herbal ingredients are marketed as calming agents for horses, although little scientific evidence validating the effectiveness of these substances exists.

Undesirable locomotor behaviors, such as weaving and stall-walking, may be related more to confinement frustration then to nutritional issues; however, providing additional forage often resolves these problems by giving the horse a distracting and competing activity.

Increased forage consumption also reduces, but does not eliminate, wood-chewing in horses. Crib-biting behavior in horses seems to be linked to nutritional physiology and management. Although cribbing stimulates saliva flow, cribbing horses have less saliva and a more acidic gastric environment than noncribbers. Antacid therapy has been shown to raise gastric pH in adult horses that crib, although it had no effect on cribbing frequency.

Managers should closely monitor horses for undesirable behaviors and should naturalize horse management by reducing soluble carbohydrates in the diet and increasing forage consumption, exercise, and socialization opportunities.

Read more from Advances in Equine Nutrition IV.