Wood chewing habit update
Posted by Bill on Apr 27 2007 at 11:22 pm | Tagged as: Horse Health
As I’ve mentioned before, Moonshine has a wood-chewing habit. She’ll nibble on our fence, especially after a meal or a snack and then she’d latch on and suck in air. Weird. One theory on why she was doing this was that maybe she was bored. Our horses spend several hours a day in a stall in the barn, after all. So we got her some horse toys, which she entirely ignored. We cut down on how much time she was in the barn and nothing changed. Eventually I had to protect her stall door with some stainless steel just to keep her from chewing on it. That worked really well (I’ll post an update about that soon) but she was still chewing on our wood fence. Another reason horses chew wood is because they’re lacking in minerals. Some horses will even eat dirt, though I haven’t ever seen her doing that. But I think we may have found the cause for Moonshine’s bad habit. For about a month now we’ve been feeding our horses Purina Strategy. For about $12 per 50 pound bag, it’s more expensive than the local feed store’s sweet oat blend but we had a coupon from the last Purina Horse Owner’s Workshop and decided to give it a try. Purina doesn’t pay us anything (we’re not connected with them in any way) so this is our honest observation. Since we started Moonshine on Strategy, I haven’t noticed her chewing wood. She’ll still lick it some but I don’t see her chewing or sucking air anymore. Purina claims Strategy provides all the necessary nutrients pleasure horses need and maybe our local feed store’s blend was missing some things. There have been some other benefits but I’ll cover those in another post.
I’ll keep an eye on her but at the moment, it seems we’ve mostly licked (haha!) this bad horse habit. If your horse has a similar habit, I suggest trying some changes to its feed mix to make sure it’s consuming a good blend of minerals.
I was wondering if you have horse mineral blocks in the stalls? Maybe you don’t need a complete feed change, just a supplement. I have a block mounted on the wall
of the stall and the horse will go to it several times while eating. Blocks are cheap and one block lasts me 1 to 2 months.
–Mike
Good point, Mike. We have small ones in each of the stalls next to their water buckets and the large salt lick we use outside is a mineral salt lick.
Salt licks are pupular with my horses too. They have a large block (as quarried from the ground - a 100lb boulder of salt!) in their turnout. Oddly enough, they were less interested in the regular commercially-made horse salt licks when I tried those.
Maybe you can have the mineral content of your grass and hay tested? The results could be compared against the minerals that a horse needs.
When a horse sucks wind like that, it can actually be an addiction that can cause them problems long term. Look up ‘horse cribbing’in google. Here’s one link: http://www.alphahorse.com/horse-cribbing.html
We work with at a horse rescue at times (that’s where we’ve adopted our horses from) and one of the horses there has a true cribbing addiction. If it’s not caught early, it can lead to them doing it all the time.
For a while last year, we had a horse bording here, I think it was 2 months. This horse chewed wood, all wood. She didn’t wind suck though, thankfully. Well our two horses picked up on her bad habit and thought it looked like fun, especially our young horse who was already having problems gaining weight due to neglect the first year of his life. We finally bought him a grazing muzzle. It’s this metal ‘cage’ that clips onto his halter. It allows the horse to still graze, but not chew wood. We only had to use that during the day, when it wasn’t meal time, for a few weeks and he kicked the habit. He still chews some times, but only when he’s really bored. He likes to play a lot, so he gets bored more easily then my mare.
I too am a first time horse owner, a lifelong dream. I just began supplementing him with Purina Strategy, and have been warned it make make him too “hot” to ride.
Anyone else feeding it seen that happen?
I hope others chime in here Julia but to the contrary, Strategy hasn’t made our horses too “hot” at all. In fact they “cooled down” (using the same temperature analogy) from when we used sweet oats, which really tended to rile them up! I’m not against sweet oats, by the way, I’m just saying Strategy gets them less excited and may have helped control Moonshine’s wood-chewing problem.
Julia, we were told that it would help calm them down, as compared to using “sweet feed” - oats with molasses. That’s what we had been feeding them, oats with or without molasses. They really are calmer, I believe, and they don’t hoover down their feed like they used to. They even wander around the stalls while they’re eating these days, and they never would have done that with oats. So all in all, it seems to be a good change.
It’s really up to you if you want your horse to eat Strategy or sweet oats, or even use a salt lick. All work in most cases. If cost is what helps you make your decision, then salt licks are good, but they have to be replaced. Don’t let other people’s opinions change your mind, ’cause after all, it’s your horse!
First time horse owner here! Today I found your blog and am so very happy. Thank you for posting such interesting and inspiring entries.
My horses have “skinned” some of the trees they use for shelter. They are bored. This summer I will be trying them on a suppliment.
Anywho, keep up the great work! I look forward to reading more in the future.
Good day!
AS horse trainer .. i highly reccomed that when horse’s are brought to my stable for trainning that they are put on Strategy… and the reason being while they are being worked it helps keep thier weights good and they even look better durning show season. this is all i feed my horses..
That’s a pretty good endorsement for Strategy. We still love it. With the hay shortage and lack of forage in their pasture right now, their nutritional needs are even more urgent. They have very little grass out there, but their weights are still good and everyone who sees them says they look very healthy and well-cared for.
We found a great all natural mineral salt lick from fireflytraders.com. Our horses love this salt lick. It is very unique as it is on a rope so it can be hung in a stall. We bought a 5 lb brick too in July and now four months later we still have not had to replace it since it is so hard the horses can’t bite chunks off. The website fireflytraders.com has several sizes available at a good price for these Himalayan salt licks. This salt contains 84 trace minerals.
We got our first horse a few months ago. She is a 20+ yr old appy and we love her but she was chewing our barn to shreds!! we changed feeds, and tried salt licks and went to some of the commercial stop chew sprays. Nothing worked until we read an article from an austrailian web site suggesting to use irish spring soap on the wood. Within days she stopped chewing and we just realpy the soap every few weeks and we are all set! it helps leave the barn irish spring clean too!