Why You Need Slow Feed Hay Nets For Horses

Hi, Jack here from Slow Feed Nets.
I ‘m continuing my blog series on natural horse keeping methods and today we are talking about slow feed hay nets for horses.

I think it’s first important to understand why we want to slow down our horses as they eat hay.
And the reason for that is on average your horse produces 16 gallons of acidic gastric juice per day.
That is equivalent to three of these five-gallon buckets.
It’s enough to fill the tank of your average sized car or fill half of an average sized bathtub.

Horses are grazing animals and are designed to eat small bits of grass for 18 hours a day, typically consuming 3% of their body weight each day.
In order to digest this constant flow of food, their stomachs produce about 16 gallons of acidic gastric juice a day.
This is important to consider when developing a feeding regimen for our domestic horses, you know, they fall into feeding regimes that are based on human convenience.

Which means they get fed twice a day, morning and afternoon.
And they’ re really not designed to eat a huge amount of food at one sitting.
They are grazers.
That means they are designed to eat little bits of food every time throughout the entire day.

So, I’m going to show you how we’re going to help to supply our horses with hay all day, and to help prevent the stomach ulcers that can be caused with Aldus.
Acid in their tummies, but not having anything to digest that’s what ulcers come from.
Ulcers can cause a lot of training issues, behavioral issues.
They’re painful. So, we want to prevent it.

Here we are in the running shed.
This is where the horses come in to get out of the weather or enjoy some shade.
This is also where I’m going to put our round bale.
The round bale is protected from moisture and will last longer.
Because it’s not going to get damp and moldy which is not good for the horses.
And, the only thing you really need to do is to make turning regular round bale into a slow feed round bale is to buy one of these ginormous round bale nets. In other words, you need a hay nets for horses.

You can see it is made with meshed holes in two inches wide.
So, when this covers the round bale, the horses have to really work hard to pull a little strand of hay through there.
And it really slows them down which is good for their tummies.
For the reasons we discussed it gives that gastric acid something to work on that’s not the lining of their stomach.

And for you, it saves you money, because this could feed longer than just putting it in the hay feeder without the nets.
Because they can gobble that up and probably less than a week.

All right, so we have the round bale flipped up on its base we have it covered in the nets.
If you want to know how to use slow feed hay nets to cover your hay, just click the link.

Finally, you are recommended to put the hay bale onto the tractor tire or something else, that just to keep the hay off the ground to keep it dry.

Now I’d like hear from you:
Do you think slow feed hay net is necessary?
What are your good points to feed horses much healthier?
Let us know by leaving a comment below right now.