Does haylage affect a horses behaviour?
I’ve been feeding my pony haylage for the last 3 years. I can’t get decent quality small bales of hay where I live, so unless I want my pony to starve over the winter, it’s haylage and a couple of pints of 10% food for the vitamins/minerals, or nothing. It’s much richer than hay so you don’t feed as much as you would hay, about half the amount is needed. Yes his stools will be looser and wetter than when on hay, usually lighter (yellower) than on grass, but not nearly as bad as new grass, and certainly not diarrhea. No, as long as you don’t overfeed your horse and monitor his response to haylage, he should be fine. Make sure that you get decent quality haylage, don’t feed anything that is mouldy, dark brown, rotted, water soaked or doesn’t “smell” right. You need to be, if possible, more careful with the quality haylage than you are with hay, because it is sold in plastic and you can’t examine the contents before purchase. Only buy a small number of bales at a time so that you are feed
I have been feeding haylage for over 20 years and never had a horse founder or colic on it nor have I had them tie up with azuturia from a build up of lactic acid. That is a load of bull! As with hay, haylage can vary in quality. Some can be very high in protein especially Italian rye grass. I have found a couple of horses get loose motions from mixing haylage and Alpha. I now feed a dried grass as a chaff with their feed rather than Alpha A.If you are feeding an Alpha as a chaff cut it out and try that. If your horse has changed environment it might take him a while to settle fully.
You shouold always introduce a change in feeding gradually. Haylage is fine but as said above give less as it is richer. Hay is better as they have more chewing since you give more. In your case I would go to his previous owner and ask for some of what he had before and start again giving him that and adding just a little haylage every day for a couple of weeks. This builds up the bacteria needed to break it down inside his gut before feeding haylage on it’s own. In my experience horses love haylage and far prefer it to hay once they have got used to the taste but it does put on weight lb for lb faster than hay which you may or not want.
