Nutritional Considerations When Preparing Competition Horses For Stay Away And International Shows
When traveling to a stay away show, or even travelling internationally, proper nutritional preparation is key to ensuring your horse adapts smoothly to the change in environment. Ideally, the bulk of this preparation should be done at home, giving your horse the best chance to settle in and perform well once you arrive. It’s also crucial to anticipate potential challenges and be prepared with strategies to address them.
Before travelling, your horse should be at an optimal body fat score suited to its specific discipline. If you know that your horse is prone to dropping significant weight whilst travelling, it may be worth maintaining them at a slightly higher body fat score to account for this. Optimal body fat should ideally be achieved and maintained in the months leading up to the season, with only minor adjustments needed in the final weeks. Attempting significant dietary changes, such as switching to a higher-energy feed or switching to starch as the predominate energy just a couple of weeks before the show, doesn't allow enough time for the horse to fully adapt and efficiently utilize this energy.
Horses have sensitive hindguts, which can easily be disrupted by sudden changes in feed or forage. To maintain consistency while you're away, it’s essential to bring your own feed. Ensure you bring enough to cover the entire trip and confirm that the feed can be legally imported into the country you're traveling to.
While bringing feed from home is a common practice, the adjustment to new forage is often overlooked. If possible, it's ideal to bring your own forage to last the duration of the show. If space is limited, consider bringing a few bales to mix into the new forage, easing the transition. For those traveling by plane or to a country that doesn't allow forage imports, another option is to have the forage used at the competition sent to your home yard. This allows you to transition the horses onto the new forage gradually, so that once you arrive at the competition they are fully adjusted and able to perform at their best.
Even with these preparations, traveling can still cause stress to your horse, leading to issues like reduced water intake and loss of appetite, which can increase the risk of colic and gastric ulcers. To help mitigate this, ensure your horse has built up a robust digestive tract at home, by providing constant access to forage, managing starch intake, and offering digestive support, such as probiotics. Building up immunity and antioxidant supplies through natural vitamin E supplementation is also key to support the stress of both travel and work.
Despite these efforts, some horses may lose their appetite when away from home. While the goal is to stick to their usual feeding plan, horses don’t always follow the rules. If they refuse their regular feed, a compromise is necessary. We recommend bringing a few alternative feed options that your horse would not usually eat at home, including a balancer, which can be fed by the handful when walking past the stable door, to ensure they still meet their vitamin, mineral, and protein needs. Any additional feed they consume on top of this is a bonus. Since these new feeds or balancers are offered in small amounts at a time, the risk of digestive disturbance is reduced.
Dehydration and premature fatigue are also common due to reduced water intake. Horses are very sensitive to changes in water taste, so it’s crucial to prepare them for this in advance. In the weeks leading up to competition, get them accustomed to different water sources, including electrolyte water, and consider introducing a rehydration mash, such as Re-Covery Mash. This will make the change less of a shock when they encounter different water at the competition.
The most important thing is to treat every horse as an individual and know the signs to look out for if something isn’t quite right.
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