Is Two Better Than One?: The story of proving tradition

In this episode, we again visit some abstracts from the Equine Science Symposium, this time with Dr. Sara Mastellar, Associate Professor of the Ohio State Agriculture and  Technology Institute.  While tradition may say feeding twice a day is best, what does the data really say?

Transcript

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Kris Hiney: Welcome to extension horses, tack box talk series horse stories with a purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Kris Hiney, with Oklahoma State University, and today we're going to be continuing to talk about some of the current research that was just discussed at our equine science symposium. So to discuss some of the effects of feeding frequency on horse behavior and some other

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Kris Hiney: nutritional information. We have Dr. Sarah Masteller, who is an associate professor at Ohio State Agricultural Technical Institute, and who's also their equine program coordinator. That's a lot, Sarah. So welcome back.

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Sara Mastellar: It's good to be here. So yeah, I teach courses about horses in Worcester, Ohio.

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Kris Hiney: Still have time to do research.

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Kris Hiney: You know that's what the summer's for. Right.

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Kris Hiney: Hey? Busy lady! So you had a number of abstracts presented at this meeting, as well as some from 2 years ago, that are really looking at feeding frequency on horses. So let's just dive right in and tell us a little bit about what you and your group has learned from your summer projects.

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Sara Mastellar: Sure. So I guess we should start with like, why I wanted to study feeding frequency. So growing up a lot of the manuals about horse care that we were exposed to kind of assumed that you fed twice a day. Maybe if you were at, you know, a high end facility. They fed like lunch hay, or something like that.

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Sara Mastellar: So I guess I grew up with that assumption of like everybody feeds twice a day, and then, being exposed to some other areas of the country and some other, I guess thoughts on how to feed horses. I noticed that not everybody does it that way.

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Sara Mastellar: Which you know, sort of sparked an interest in. What does that mean for the horse? And also, how does the industry do that more broadly? So

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Sara Mastellar: there's been some previous research in the literature on like, how many times a day does the industry feed, and twice a day is one of the more common ones, but as many as like 30% are feeding their horses once a day. So that was the result of an Australian survey.

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Sara Mastellar: and that was published in 2018. So one of the more modern ones. And then I kind of fell down a rabbit hole. It's like looking through

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Sara Mastellar: back in history, and I found a horse care manual from the 16 hundreds, and they were feeding oats 2 to 4 times a day, and then hay also more times a day. So as our relationship with the horse has changed in what they do with us, and also like our life structure, with jobs.

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Sara Mastellar: we see more and more of the feeding, maybe once or twice a day, rather than 3 or more times a day.

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Kris Hiney: And I know, like we give recommendations for people. Certainly, you know, on the forage side, like we want to make sure that their stomach isn't empty, so if you can't feed more frequently, we slow them down. If you have to feed huge amounts of grain, then we break that up. But I mean, I know for me in Oklahoma. And hopefully, you talk about this a little bit.

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Kris Hiney: but we have a lot of horses that run with cattle right? And so they don't feed every day. They feed every other day right? At least the concentrate portion. So I think you're right. There's such a spectrum from us, being like, go out and feed them all the time, and then the reality of what people's lives do. So

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Kris Hiney: tell us a little bit about what you learned.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah. So we wanted our current study to reflect feeding practices and industry. So you talked about slowing them down. So we did use slow feed hay nets to do our hay, and then the complementary pellets. We used nose bags when they were outside in a group, and then they had corner feeders when they were inside their stalls. So we fed. Our feeding frequencies were once, twice or 3 times per day.

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Sara Mastellar: and they got both their hay and their concentrate pellets or complementary feed pellets at the same time. So we fed hay immediately before grain.

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Sara Mastellar: So we did quite a few measures. We looked at group behavior when they were fed in groups of 6. We also looked at individual behavior, and we recorded them for 24 h inside, and then we put heart rate monitors on them to see how that impacted, or how the feeding frequencies might have impacted heart rate.

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Sara Mastellar: And then we took some blood samples across the morning meal of the study. So we did quite a lot of measures. And I guess, would you want to learn about 1st

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Sara Mastellar: behavior, heart rate.

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Kris Hiney: Well, I mean, behavior and heart rate are sort of tied together. So why don't we just jump in with behavior? And then you can link, how heart rate corresponds to it!

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Sara Mastellar: Sure. So the horses had their heart rate monitors on during the individual behavior portion of the study. So

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Sara Mastellar: we have 24 h of video recording of the horses within the stalls. And

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Sara Mastellar: it takes a while to watch all that video. And we did what's called continuous sampling. So we're watching every second of the of the video footage.

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Sara Mastellar: whereas the other option would be scan sampling. So every so often you'd take a note of what the horse was doing. So the data on the individual behavior is only 6 of our horses. We had 12 in total.

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Sara Mastellar: But what we really learned from that, or what we confirmed from that is, horses are really individual. So treatment did not have a significant effect on behavior. But horse the individual horse did in quite a few of the different behaviors. So I think it's really important that you notice that your horse is an individual.

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Sara Mastellar: and you manage for that particular individual

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Sara Mastellar: and then, interestingly, we did see a treatment effect of heart rate.

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Sara Mastellar: So behavior, unfortunately, cannot tell the whole story, and that's part of why we took more measures, and our horses that were fed once a day had a

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Sara Mastellar: higher heart rate than the ones fed 2 or 3 times per day, and looking at the data, you might think well, oh, the.

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Sara Mastellar: you know, anticipating that bigger meal. Right? Be really excited about that. But that's not really what happened. We saw that the heart rate was, if you look at the graph, remained elevated compared to the other treatments across the 12 h that they were wearing the heart rate monitors. So

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Sara Mastellar: there has been other research that show that if there's gastric ulcers or something like that, the heart rate is higher right? So maybe only feeding once per day

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Sara Mastellar: could have created some gastric discomfort. And that's 1 of the reasons why we don't recommend feeding once per day is that there's some potential, for.

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Sara Mastellar: you know, upsetting their systems.

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Kris Hiney: So in that once per day. So you said, and I want to clarify you had slowed them down to do the so that how on my once per day treatment, how many hours contiguous were they eating.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah. So the complementary pellets. Obviously they finished that pretty quick, but they still had hay in their slow feeder nets at the end of the day when we were giving everybody dinner, the ones that were on the other treatments dinner. So they didn't have what you might call as large of an out of feed

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Sara Mastellar: event, as you might expect if you had fed them without a slow feeder net. So.

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Kris Hiney: But even with slow feeders we want to do it twice a day, I mean, I think

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Kris Hiney: the horses say.

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Sara Mastellar: Well. So I mean the complementary feeds the other the piece of that right? So if you break that into smaller portions

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Sara Mastellar: that could have an impact on the GI health as well.

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Kris Hiney: So you said something interesting. I'm going to go back to you said that there wasn't in the behavior as much treatment effect because every horse was an individual. So tell me a little bit like what kind of big variations did you see in individual horses?

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Sara Mastellar: So we had horse effects on how often or actually, how long duration of behavior that they spent standing or standing alert, eating hay, standing relaxed or dozing locomotion. We had one that was doing a little bit of stall walking.

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Sara Mastellar: we eating concentrate. They all spent the same about the same amount of time doing that

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Sara Mastellar: and then amount of time drinking amount of time doing investigative behavior, pawing

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Sara Mastellar: and urination. So horse really impacted the duration they spent doing different behaviors, and also, as you might expect, the frequency of behaviors as well, and the list is fairly similar.

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Kris Hiney: Okay. So some horses were just more active than others.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah, and I think if we had done some sort of personality. Scoring that would have been really interesting to see, you know how they handled confinement? Right? Cause. This was the individual behavior within the stalls. This data.

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Kris Hiney: Were they confined previously.

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Sara Mastellar: So they had all been used to being stalled. We kept them outside as much as we could, but then we wanted to bring them in so that we could get that 24 h snapshot of their of their behavior.

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Sara Mastellar: So

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Sara Mastellar: we also did behavior or recordings during the morning meal when they were outside as well. So we have that information as well

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Sara Mastellar: so the group housed horses yeah,

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Kris Hiney: Alright. Well, let's hear about yeah.

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Kris Hiney: Frequency of feeding in.

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Sara Mastellar: Sure.

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Kris Hiney: Your group.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah. So we did see a treatment effect of meal feeding frequency, and the horses that were fed 3 times a day stood alert more frequently, and there was more aggression seen post feeding. And now this data is only encompassing the 2 h surrounding feeding so

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Sara Mastellar: an hour before, and then an hour after. And so 2 h total. So what it doesn't show is the frequency or duration of the behaviors over a longer period, which we did with the individual data.

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Sara Mastellar: So I think, as a horse owner and manager, you really need to be aware that feeding time can cause horses to be a little bit more aggressive, right?

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Kris Hiney: I'm familiar with.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah, exactly.

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Sara Mastellar: And if you have small portions.

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Sara Mastellar: you may see an uptick in that aggressive behavior.

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Sara Mastellar: And there was also some impact of dominance ratings. So you saw dominant horses, you know, displacing other horses more frequently, and that sort of thing.

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Kris Hiney: So because the essentially they were, they finished their portion faster than they were. Gonna go try to get somebody else's. But didn't you say they had nose bags on, or is that.

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Sara Mastellar: They did have nose bags on for the complementary feed. But once you take those off, then they're back to their  hay nets. Right?

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Sara Mastellar: Okay.

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Sara Mastellar: and we did have 7 haynets per 6 horses. So there was an extra one. But we did see one of our more dominant horses actually resource guard 2 separate haynets.

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Sara Mastellar: She's having to move quite a lot on the 3 times per day treatment. So

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Sara Mastellar: we saw maybe an uptick in in resource guarding when they perceived there to be limited resources, even though we were going to show up for lunch and then also dinner. So they got the same amount of feed

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Sara Mastellar: within the day.

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Kris Hiney: So do you think it was just? And now we're just hypothesizing, right? So that like excitement factor, I mean, I know just my own personal horses. They're always optimistic every time, like I'm out there, they're like, Oh, maybe you're going to feed me. I'm like, no, no, it's not time yet like, do they just start getting into that like, they're here.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah. So there's some interesting research on stereotypic behaviors and those auto feeders.

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Sara Mastellar: And the more frequently you have mealtimes the more times they're going to display some of that anticipatory behavior. So I think that might play a role in it as well. Right? So what do they expect.

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Kris Hiney: Right? Yeah, I I think I've read some of that. Those auto feeders essentially turned out to not be a good idea, because the horses were like, I'm gonna guard this auto feeder because you never know when the little slot machine is gonna pay.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah, so I and I wonder if there's ways that you can do this with your with your management, to make it less of a focus from that anticipatory standpoint. Now, yeah, now, we're just hypothesizing. But somebody probably needs to do the research to show like.

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Sara Mastellar: is there a way that you can train your horse that it's only these particular times

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Sara Mastellar: and then making sure that you're feeding them before the stereotypic behavior if you can.

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Sara Mastellar: So it might be interesting to like.

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Sara Mastellar: start them at a later feeding time, and then slowly shift them closer to what you want as their feeding time to see if that helps reduce your stereotypic behavior.

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Kris Hiney: Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I mean in in my head. I just think like they're so good at figuring time out right. I mean, everybody knows the horses like it's this o'clock time, and your dog and your cat is the same way, right? They're very good at chronologically tuning in you'd have to. Yeah, I don't know if you just have to do it long term to see if it kinda settles in or what. But.

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Sara Mastellar: Hmm.

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Kris Hiney: Interesting thoughts.

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Kris Hiney: I do like the picture in my head of the horse resource guarding the 2 haynets. I literally have seen my I've done the same thing with slow feeders, and he's like, no, I take this one. No, I take this one. I'm like.

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Sara Mastellar: Yep.

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Kris Hiney: Dude you're wasting so much time right now.

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Kris Hiney: Funny! Funny! All right. So then you said you've got some blood work on top of all of this right. So.

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Kris Hiney: Let's hear a little bit about blood.

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Sara Mastellar: Right. So back in 2023, we presented plasma amino acids in response to our treatments, and if you think about it, the horse digests protein, breaks it down into amino acids for absorption, and then they would show up in your blood plasma.

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Sara Mastellar: So if you think about it, small amount of protein. Get a little bit larger amount of protein, you'd get more, and you know, so on. But we didn't see a dose response in our data. So post feeding, we saw the same response rise in plasma amino acids

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Sara Mastellar: about to the same level with each of the treatments and then coming back down toward Baseline.

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Sara Mastellar: And, as you know, horses are trickle feeders, right? So if we give them this big bolus of protein.

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Sara Mastellar: maybe they can't utilize it, so we don't know if

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Sara Mastellar: the amino acids are from the meal, or, you know, degradation of protein. So in the body, right? So those both add to the plasma amino acid pool.

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Sara Mastellar: But the meal was a major

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Sara Mastellar: piece, right? So we would kind of expect that dose response. But since we didn't see that

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Sara Mastellar: maybe it's best practice to feed more times per day. If you want better

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Sara Mastellar: bioavailability of that protein that you're feeding.

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Kris Hiney: Interesting. So and you're, I mean, it's not really a digestibility issue, right? You aren't going past where we think about you exceed

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Kris Hiney: digestibility and rate of passage to the small intestine right? I mean, they were still fairly small meals. You weren't going like Mega dose right.

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Sara Mastellar: Right? Yeah. So we did it to reflect. Our, you know, typical American equine diet. So they weren't getting more than 6 pounds even in their big meals.

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Kris Hiney: So.

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Sara Mastellar: So, yeah, if you want better protein bioavailability, you could try more frequent meals throughout the day. And that's what you see in other species, right bodybuilders eating protein throughout the day, and things like that.

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Kris Hiney: So then if you're, I'm just gonna hypothesize here. So you're saying that twice a day you get more bang for your buck right for your feed.

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Kris Hiney: So, therefore, if you are doing an every other day feeding, and that's where a lot of the complementary protein is coming from that for at least the equine. Who does not have a rumen. Are you saying that, or has anybody done that? I mean, that was to me my follow up is like, has anybody done the cattle version of frequency of feeding with horses.

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Sara Mastellar: So are you asking, has anybody done the treatment of every other day in horses, or okay? Not that I know of. So I did look up in the NRC The protein requirement is based on a meta-analysis of a bunch of different studies. So I looked up. What was the feeding frequency in all of those studies, and

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Sara Mastellar: if if it was listed, it was twice per day.

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Kris Hiney: Okay.

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Sara Mastellar: So. I guess it was an assumption that twice per day right? And our requirements are per day.

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Sara Mastellar: But horses are trickle feeders is, is per day. The correct.

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Kris Hiney: You're saying for 12 h or.

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Sara Mastellar: I don't know. It might be, or maybe if it's something that they store, maybe it doesn't have to be per day.

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Kris Hiney: Well, are you doing gonna do that project next summer? I mean, this summer is a wash, right? Because you have to fill out the paperwork, but you to do that one for me specifically.

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Sara Mastellar: Well, if you have funding.

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Kris Hiney: No, I just have a good job.

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Kris Hiney: That's what I get paid in. Yeah. So I think, like, that's interesting. We make so many assumptions like, Oh, this is what everybody does. But sometimes it may not be true, and we don't really know, like, what does that have a big impact on.

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Kris Hiney: you know. Not it's not really feed efficiency, I would say, because we're not growing them. We're not doing what the cattle people do. But

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Kris Hiney: still, I mean, it's kinda there's an economic component for sure.

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Kris Hiney: Right? Yeah, yeah, it's just not in gain, is it? Just in how well the horse is using it so

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Kris Hiney: well. This is fantastic, what? And I know you said money. But what projects do you have lined up next? Or do you still have data left to comb through on this one.

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Sara Mastellar: So we still have some data to comb through on this one. So the individual data was the daytime. So we have nighttime to go through as well as finishing. We have the data on glucose and insulin that I need to write up so more to come on this particular project. For sure.

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Kris Hiney: Okay. So you know the answers. You just haven't written them down yet.

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Sara Mastellar: Yeah. Haven't. Pub, yes. Published.

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Kris Hiney: And you're not gonna tell me.

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Sara Mastellar: As you might expect. There's a dose response with glucose and insulin to meal size. Right? So I think that the protein is a. And the amino acids are a more interesting story because you don't see that same dose response.

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Kris Hiney: Right. And we and I, there's a lot of literature on dose and glucose just because we have to worry about all these little weirdo insulin dysregulated horses all the time.

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Kris Hiney: and if you own one, they're not weird. They're just unique.

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Sara Mastellar: We did screen these horses for insulin dysregulation before conducting the study. So we don't have

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Sara Mastellar: them in the mix, and their unique metabolism.

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Kris Hiney: Right. Yes, they are very unique. Well, I really appreciate you taking your time to catch us up, because you know, our general public isn't there in the meetings and reading through abstracts? Right is not super fun for the vast majority of horse owning public. So I think it's good to just break it out. Tell us what their important information was there, and what we should do with it. So here's your one sentence. Wrap up.

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Kris Hiney: Sarah, what are you going to tell horse owners to do.

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Sara Mastellar: Sure. So feeding frequency is a tool, and if you can do at least 2, that's good, 3 may be better. And then there are some individual horse factors that you might want to take into account in managing your particular horse.

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Kris Hiney: Awesome. Well again. Appreciate your time, and we'll maybe put some links to some of these abstracts if people really want to get crazy and read them themselves. But this has been another episode of our tack box talk Horse stories with a purpose.