Feeding from the sales ring to racecourse
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Author - Cath Dunnett
Horseracing’s international sales rings can perhaps be regarded or compared with the professional show circuit. To achieve optimum interest and price, youngsters not only need to be genetically well endowed but must be appealing to the buyers eye. Youngsters need to be in good body condition, ideally fit but not fat with good muscle tone, sufficient topline and a gleaming healthy coat. However the overall ‘picture’ desirable for the sales ring may not be the most appropriate for full training and competitive racing, and so trainers may find themselves needing to resculpture horses in their early days of training.
Yearling Prep
Yearlings are prepared (‘prepped’) intensively for the sales ring. Whilst most yearling prep regimes will incorporate some exercise, this tends to be mostly walking; and yearlings may lack the established and better developed musculature needed for racing. There is also a high reliance on feeding to deliver the ‘sales ring look’.
Prep regimes are often short lived and designed to increase weight and condition relatively quickly, and to produce gleaming coat condition and topline—the latter of which can therefore be based on deposition of adipose tissue or fat, rather than muscle development or hypertrophy.
A prep period typically involves feeding a large amount of high energy, starch-rich feed over a relatively short period of time, typically 6-8 weeks. Research tells us that this prep period is likely to be one of the high risk times for non-glandular gastric ulcers to develop. Large starch-rich feeds, confinement, increased periods of stress and restricted access to pasture or forage are all significant risk factors for gastric ulcers.
Some yearlings will inevitably arrive at the trainer or pre-trainers yard with pre-existing non glandular ulcers, which may require veterinary treatment, or at the very least a sympathetic high forage, low-starch and sugar-based ration for early training. It may be controversial to suggest, but a longer slower period of prep for sales would perhaps allow for a greater contribution from exercise to build muscle, combined with a less intense feeding regime. However, time and economics probably contain too much deviation from the existing model.
Bone Density
Yearlings that move through from studs to sales prep and then into a training yard undergo a very big change in their feed and management that is worthy of consideration. A stud regime and diet are very different to both sales prep and pre-training, in terms of composition and environment. At stud, these young animals spend a large portion of their day at pasture, with a generally small amount of top up feed or balancers to complement the grazing.
A diet, which is typically high in pasture and forage and low in cereals, allows minerals such as calcium to be firmly sequestered in bone, maintaining bone density. In horses on good pasture, this is aided by the high vitamin K1 content of pasture, which is needed to activate osteocalcin involved in the sequestration of calcium in bone. In contrast, with a high-cereal, low-forage prep or pre-training diet—as a result of quite complicated homeostatic mechanisms involving hormones such as parathyroid hormone—calcium can become relatively more mobilised from bone. The characteristic drop in bone density commonly seen in racehorses in the first 60-90 days of training can be the physical result of this phenomenon.
Forage First
Yearlings may come into training on the larger side of perfect for racing; and so it may, at first glance, seem counterintuitive to feed plenty of forage at this time. However, in early training it is a worthwhile exercise, as it establishes good eating habits.
Horses in training often self limit their forage intake, as training progresses and appetite is reduced, which can contribute to problems including inability to maintain condition, gastric ulcers and tying up if the forage intake drops too low. Better to start from a slightly higher intake early on, than to find a horse on a forage knife edge later in training.
Forage, whether hay or haylage, contributes significantly to energy and electrolyte intake and is a particularly rich source of potassium—an important electrolyte for overall metabolism and muscle function. Leguminous forage such as alfalfa/lucerne is highly digestible and so has a reduced effect on gut fill (hay belly). Alfalfa is equally rich in calcium to help buffer the natural mobilisation and loss of calcium from bone during early training.
A couple of kilograms of alfalfa per day complements a more traditional less digestible hay such as Timothy. The added advantage of feeding a decent amount of forage is that the level of concentrate feed needed will also be reduced. Forage provides energy mainly from fibre and so is not generally associated with excitability, with the energy provided being colloquially known as slow-release energy.
A decent amount of forage for a horse in training is about 1.5% of bodyweight; so for a 500kg horse, that’s about 7-8kg or 4 typical slices. For haylage, this needs to be slightly higher to account for its higher water content.
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