Jessica Cha, Entry #4, Diets for the Horses

My fifth week at my lab has come to an end, and I cannot believe that the time has flown by this quickly. We had to take a few days off from the research, because my PI sprained her ankle over the weekend, but we were quickly back at work once she could properly walk again. We continued our herbage mass collecting and step-point in the fields, and checked up on the conditions of the horses. Similar to last time, we weighed, took an ultrasound, and recorded body condition scores of all nine horses.

Ultrasound machine

We take three horses at a time and walk them over a scale as we lead them into the stalls. Once each one is groomed, we take them one by one to the ultrasound machine and measure the fat in the tail head area. We then run our hands over the major areas of fat, and give them a score from 1-9.

One of the students feeling the fat on the neck of the horse

Last time we did this, some of the horse were scored 7 and 8. Although they are still not in the best condition, this time, it was easier to feel their ribs as we ran our hands over the fat. We will still have to put some of the horses into stress lots once the research is done, but they did lose a bit of fat. 

While their body condition scores did improve, the horses didn't seem to have been eating less. In fact, they seemed to have been eating more. The horses in one of the rotational fields had eaten all of the grass over the span of a week, and we had to put them into their stress lot where they were on a measured diet of hay until the grass grew back. One of the horses in one of the continuous fields also ran over to the area of grass we were supposed to collect, and started to eat our data. So, they must be exercising in the fields to lose weight since their appetites seem to have increased.

Next week, we will continue our work in the fields and on the horses.