I have had a couple of rough keepers here and there. For those that had no teeth, or teeth too bad to do anything with, we used a 12% sweet feed (all grain, with light molasses) soaked down or "tiz-whiz" with is a pelleted feed, mixed half and half with the sweet feed- and all of it soaked down. Beet pulp is a great thing- we use the shredded variety, with molasses added, and mix it up 1/2 a 5gal bucket at a time, covered in plastic to keep the flies out Granted, we were feeding 10-12 horses a day out of that- big double handfuls on each feeding. (comes out to roughly 1lb of soaked and squeezed beet pulp per feeding.)

Hay is absolutely vital- quantity and quality. either get the best grass hay to can find (for older horses and horses with heaves, soaking it down helps with the ability to chew it without choking) or amend lesser quality grass hay with alfalfa or a CLOVER mix- clover is the absolute best thing to get bang for the buck- less lignun (the undigestible woody part) more of everything they need out of the hay. If you can't get it in hay form, ask if you can seed it in patches for hand-grazing. And then take the horse back to the pasture to poop, lol- it does self-seed.

Flax always gave me nice shiny coats (as did corn oil, which we gave to lots of the elderly ones- high fat and instantly consumable), and if you CAN get them onto a good, thick pasture, it's amazing how much better they can maintain their weight.

If you're going to feed free choice hay, try to avoid a cenmtral round bale. A few decent piles scattered through a pasture or turn out helps keep them moving around and digesting things properly, and helps avoid the stocking up that you see in some horses who stand at a round bale all day. Mineral and salt blocks are essentials. Also, make sure that you keep the horse clean and sprayed for flies, small wounds treated, worming kept up religiously and such- the less energy a horse's body has to expend fighting off outside factors in their environment, they better they can gain and hold weight- it's just like humans- if you have an infection or rash on your skin, your body has to fight that infection or rash, and uses up valuable calories to do so. It may no be a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but on a skinny horse, every calorie counts.

 
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Horse and I, we're dancers in the Dark

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