Horses are frequently housed in facilities that are often designed more for the comfort of the horse owner than for the horse. Horse housing is notoriously poorly ventilated to the point of being air-tight in some cases, and the horses are subjected to breathing poor-quality air. Hence, emphases should be placed on high-quality, dust-free, mold-free hay or cubed or pelleted forage or forage/grain combinations. Fear of fecal contamination of hay and/or grain with the causative organism for equine protozoal myelitis has prompted some horse farm managers to feed all forages and concentrates entirely as bagged cubes, pellets or texturized feeds. The fear of feeding hay and grains from bulk storage may decrease as an effective vaccine is developed for this disease.
May 02 2008 | Article | No Comments »
The energy level of the diet indirectly influences feed efficiency via its effect on feed intake. In many locations, classical feed efficiency (feed intake divided by bodyweight gain) is still considered an important management criterion. Certainly, to an integrated operation, classical efficiency assumes less importance, being replaced by such parameters as energy intake: weight gain or feed cost per kilogram of gain or feed cost per kilogram of deboned meat, or production cost per unit of floor space.
Mortality is less of an issue today than occurred just five or six years ago. At that time, it was often necessary to use lower-energy diets and/or reduced day length as a means of controlling growth so as to reduce the incidence of metabolic disorders. Reduced day length slowed growth sufficiently so that incidence of skeletal disorders and sudden death syndrome were reduced 50%, at least in male broilers. With emphasis on genetic selection against these disorders, mortality is now much lower, and in certain instances, it is again possible to grow broilers on longer day lengths, which equates to faster growth rate.
April 20 2008 | Article | No Comments »
By Todd Mera
I want to make my horses as safe as possible in a variety of situations. Therefore I try to expose them to as many situations as possible. Although I would never advocate approaching your horse at a full sprint I think there are good reasons to let your horse get some experience around fast moving objects. For example, I was leading a couple of yearlings to my arena. I just walked through the gate and was heading for a holding stall next to the arena. For some reason after my daughter walked through the gate she decided to run towards my horses approaching them from behind. She was well out of the way from their hind legs but one of the horses spooked, which spooked the other and they both started to run. I was just about stepped on by one of the horses. This situation could have caused someone, me, to get hurt.
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April 04 2008 | Article | No Comments »