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  Discussion on Right Amount?
Author Message

Posted on Thursday, Dec 27, 2001 - 1:32 pm:

Dr. O,
I'm not sure this belongs here, but here goes.
Background information:
I have a 7 year old OTT TB mare. She has always been a poor doer, and has an espeically weak hind end. She is relatively straight in her hind legs (on the straight side of normal), and has a slightly long loin. She has never really been able to use her hind end very well. We have gone through a lot of heatache trying to find out why she won't delvelop. She has been tested for EPM, gotten a thorough lamness exam, and had x rays taken. Nothing came up positive in those avenues. A while ago, I thought of EPSM, but for some reason I can't now remember, I discounted that, or someone else discounted that for me.
Situation:
My mare tied up last night for the first time. In reading the rural heritage site, I discovered that any horse that ties up is a potential EPSM victim. I have done an amateur rendering of how much of each nutirient my horse gets. I am thinking of starting her on the high fat, low carb diet. I have a call in to my vet, and my accupressure/massage therapist, but thought I'd ask you too.
She gets the following per day:
Purina Equine Senior - 8 quarts a day (I think a quart equals 2 pounds, so that would be 16 pounds)
1 cup sunflower seeds, whole
4 pounds soaked beet pulp
20 pounds alfalfa
2 oz Accel supplement
2/3 oz Equinyl C supplement
She also eats from a poor quality round bale while out for the day, about 8 to 12 hours a day (this is shared with other horses, she doesn't get much)
Questions:
I want to switch her to the suggested Strategy/Athlete/oil diet on the rural heritage site, but we feed sunflower seeds. Three cups of sunflower seeds equal one cup of oil. Would this be bad for her? I calculated that she gets 5.6 mg/kg of selenium in her diet, and I think that is rather high. Is this correct? Am I giving her too much selenium? Sorry for the rambling, but I am confused and want to do the right thing.

Posted on Friday, Dec 28, 2001 - 6:56 am:

Alicia,
You need to read the article on Nutrition: Selenium. If your calculations are right, you are feeding roughly 20 to 50 times too much. Recheck you numbers and let me know what you get.
Are you feeding whole sunflower seeds, including the hull?
DrO

Posted on Friday, Dec 28, 2001 - 1:24 pm:

Dr. O,
I did read it, which is why I thought I was feeding too much.
I rechecked, and found out that I forgot to add the hay!! So, I had added up all the mg in all her stuff, then added all the poundage, but didn't put in the biggest 40 kg of hay!! So, it now comes out to .09 mg/kg, which is not enough!
I will probably add a Vit E Selenium supplement to her regimen now.
I plan on trying the EPSM diet. I want to try this one:
7 lbs Purina Strategy
3 lbs Purina Athlete
1/2 - 3/4 cup vegetable oil (I would use 2 cups sunflower seeds, which would be 2/3 cups oil)
10 lbs alfalfa hay
Vitamin E/selenium supplement
Trace mineral salt block
Thanks for helping me get my numbers straight! My trainer has agreed to the change in diet. We will obviously go slow to switch her over.
Yes, we are feeding the whole seed, including the hull.
Thanks,
Alicia

Posted on Sunday, Dec 30, 2001 - 11:15 am:

I think you need to recalculate again, 40 kg (88lbs) of hay a day is an unreasonable amount of hay for a horse to eat in a day. Not only must your math be good but your assumptions and measurements too!
DrO

Posted on Wednesday, Jan 2, 2002 - 12:29 pm:

Oops again. I'm just not used to doing things like this without a computer. It is actually 20 kg of hay (10 pounds). I used that in my calculation, and still came up short of the recommended .3, so I plan on adding a Selenium/E supplement. Did you find out whether the seeds are an OK replacement for the oil?
Alicia

Posted on Thursday, Jan 3, 2002 - 8:30 am:

Hello Alicia,
Whoa, 20 kg equals 44 lbs. There are 2.2 lbs per kilogram. Back to the calculator.

I cannot find any information on whole sunflower seeds with hulls. All the information I have is on oil extracted meal. Personally I think it very unlikely (read that as impossible) that 3 cups of sunflower seeds with hulls contain a cup of oil. In fact it would surprise me if there was a signigicant amount of oil in 1 cup of seeds with hulls when looking at the % fat of your total diet, they are just too light with hulls. Quit with the sunflower seeds, they are just pure nonsense from a nutritional stanpoint. If you want to feed them as a treat that is fine.

I have had as many as 2200 horses under my care at a time and never had to resort to a diet this complicated in order to maintain good health. My personal feeling here is you are building a Rube Golbergian diet while ignoring basics. Be sure your horse is getting adequate good quality forage while out in the field, it is not acceptable that she may not get enough poor quality hay daily, paraphrasing your comments above. This may well be the source of many of your problems.

Stick to one well made concentrate, there is very little benefit in mixing them. Your second diet has significent fewer calories than your first so you can expect weight loss on it.

I think you are right about adding fat to the diet for two reasons
1)you are having problems with tying up (see the article on this)
2)your horse requires many calories to maintain weight.
Better than completely rebuilding your diet would be to start adding or substituting oil for concentrte in the diet. There are rules and formulas in the article on fat in the diet.

Concerning selenium supplementation why not just follow the recommendations in the article on supplementation. It does not rquire any calculating and as long as you are not feeding any other supplemental source will not overdose. By making this so complicated you are likely to make mistakes. Your main source of confusion is not that you are having trouble calculating the exact ppm of Selemium in the diet but that you cannot see the importance of good quality forage. All the above is in the articles on feeding start with the overview then follow the links and subtopics that pertain to your particular problems.
DrO

Posted on Friday, Jan 4, 2002 - 1:34 am:

A cup of sunflower seeds with hull contain 21.7 grams of fat, 11 grams of protein, and 9.1 grams of carbohydrate. Hulls account for 46% by weight. The hulls are a good source of fiber for equines. The cup of seeds with hull should yield one third cup of hulled sunflower seeds. The fat content in a pound of whole seeds is 115.8 grams.

Lon Larson's book has information on sunflower seed hulls, and the NRC book has information on sunflower seeds. I got the above information from the Department of Agriculture.

Nancy

Posted on Friday, Jan 4, 2002 - 10:53 am:

Nancy,
THANK YOU!!! Finally some helpful information about the seeds. I think I will continue to use them instead of the oil, as our whole barn is using them, and the bulk price is really good. It looks like I will have to up the amount to get the correct amount of fat, but the fiber is good for them anyway. Again, I appreciate the information!!
Alicia

Posted on Friday, Jan 4, 2002 - 1:49 pm:

Thank you for the information Nancy. My NRC book only has extracted sunflower meal, do you have a more recent version than the 5th edition?

With these numbers we can see how this effects the diet. A 1200 lb (500 kg) horse eats roughly 30 lbs (12 kg) which equals 12,000 grams. So one cup twice daily equals appx 45 grams of fat which interprets to less than 0.004 of the diet. That is less than 1/2 a percent of the total diet which contains around 4 and 1/2 percent in a normal diet, more in the diet above due to the Equine Senior. Working the numbers with the protein are less than a 1/4 of a percent of the total diet by weight.

You can feed it for fun but as a nutritional supplement I still think it is a wash at these levels. It is cheap at these rates because of the little amount of nutrition it provides. I will bet once you figure in the cost per unit of nutrition it may be an expensive one.
DrO

Posted on Saturday, Jan 5, 2002 - 2:04 am:

You are right about the NRC book--it is solvent extracted sunflower meal. I was sleepy when I replied. Also, the other book is by Lon Lewis, not Larson. The book where I got the information is the "Nutritive Value of American Foods" (Agricultural Handbook No. 456) from the US Department of Agriculture. I have a 1975 edition, so I don't know if they still publish this.

Nancy
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