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Posted by Sharon Biggs Waller on The Horse
Horses can be amazingly hardy. On a below-freezing day, your horse can stay warm and snug. So warm, in fact, that if you put your bare hands into his coat, you can actually warm them up. It’s hard to imagine how a horse can keep himself comfortable when you are bundled up in so many layers it looks as if you could mount an expedition to the Arctic Circle! Your horse is very adept at keeping himself warm; in fact, it’s easier for him to warm up than cool down. He has more than one way to keep warm, but essentially, he is his own furnace. And with furnaces, if you put in the right fuel, heat is created. You can help kick-start that furnace in your horse by providing the proper fuel. For the horse, that fuel is food–and some foods are better for this purpose than others.
But first, let’s look at some of the ways horses stay warm.
Seasonal Insulation
“In the fall, horses that have adequate feed supplies are beginning to put on more body fat, creating insulation and stored energy,” says Bob Coleman, PhD, BSc, assistant professor and extension horse specialist at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington.
Horses increase in body mass at the time when there is good forage. Then, when Mother Nature dumps a lot of snow or when the grass isn’t very good, they’ll have stored calories to keep away cold and hunger, if needed. Although this is probably an evolutionary response, don’t count on an extra-chubby horse being able to fend for himself in the winter. That extra layer of fat might help, but it burns very quickly in cold conditions.
Despite some of our best attempts to stop it, our horses also grow a longer hair coat to keep warm. Horses grow their coats when the days get shorter, not when the days get colder (as many people believe).
“Change in daylight has a greater effect on growing a coat than change in temperature,” says Coleman. “The coat has to develop before the temperature gets cold. I grew up in western Canada, and our horses started growing winter hair in September.”
But your horse becoming a wooly mammoth in winter isn’t the “be all and end all.” That coat might protect him when the snow falls and the temperature drops, but a rain storm coupled with the cold can take away the insulating factor of your horse’s coat. In those conditions, your horse will also burn more calories to stay warm, thus depleting his stored layer of fat pretty quickly.
Still, horses have a third way to keep warm. And that is by eating.
Read the rest of the article here.
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