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.

By Joe Pagan, Ph.D. - One of the most common questions asked about feeding the performance horse is when to feed before a competition. Theoretically, feeding should be timed so that all of the nutrients from a meal have been digested, absorbed, and stored before starting exercise, but not so long before exercise that the horse begins to mobilize fuels just to maintain its resting body functions.

Feeding a mixture of barley straw and hay is a safe and cost-effective way of promoting weight loss in grazing ponies over winter, according to recent research. Obesity is a widespread problem in pleasure horses and ponies. In the past, it was accepted that horses and ponies would lose weight over the winter and then gain weight in the spring when grazing quality improved. Nowadays, however, horses are fed to maintain condition over the winter, and, at the same time, they may be doing less work.

Why Are Feeding Guidelines So Important? You may have heard of the National Research Council (NRC) and the Nutrient Requirements of Horses - but what are they and why do they matter?