Research Update: Foraging behaviour in horses

You may remember that last year we conducted a national horse forage survey for my PhD research at the University of New England. This survey was the first part of the study to collect information about foraging behaviour and diet selection of pastured domestic horses in Australia.

This was necessary because diet selection of fresh forages has been primarily studied in wild or free-roaming horses. Very little work has been done that looked into the diet selection of pastured horses and particular the selection of vegetation other than grasses and legumes is not documented.

In addition, we wanted to gain more insight in the pasture conditions of grazing areas, feeding management and the occurrence of unusual behaviours of horses at pasture. The data has been analysed and is now in a final draft to be reviewed and submitted to a peer reviewed journal. We hope later this year to provide a link to the official published paper and we will feature a summary of the results in the Horses and People and Hoofbeats Magazine. So stay tuned!

The next step in this research is to gain a better understanding of the motivations of selecting a wide range of forages by horses. We are aware that herbivores select a variety of plants to cover their nutritional requirements but there is also a complex feedback mechanism – so called post ingestive feedback – that is involved.  Animals can get satiated on the plants they select (due to flavour or nutrients) or there may be secondary compounds that are getting to excessive and so animals may need to switch to another plant source. There are many other factors that will influence diet selection of herbivores. Only limited research has been conducted with horses, so my research will focus on getting a better insight in some of these aspects for horses.

One of the first task was collecting some novel/alternative forages for horses. Finally after 5 months we finished the collection of tree/shrub forage for the first trial. We collected between 70- 100 kg of fresh weight of Tagasaste, Bamboo and Willow leaves! Just to get about 30 kg of dried and chaffed material. The other fodder Saltbush and Moringa are already ready for us.

Now we can focus on the next stage – which is getting ready for the actual forage trial with the horses. We are interested to look at novel and familiar forages and bunch of other things that I am hoping to get more insight in! Re-visit our website/blog and/or like our MB Equine Services Facebook page to get the latest updates on this research project and other educational events such as workshops or article releases.

Mariette