Poor Appetite

STEVE: A horse that has a poor appetite, you know, when you put feed in the stall, they’re not that interested in going to it. When you put hay in there they may take a few bites and then they will just walk around and maybe go sniff around the stall or maybe just ignore it completely. When this is obvious compared to what they normally would do, then you need to look into why is this horse doing this and if you haven’t evaluated it lately, hey…is this horse losing weight? Maybe he doesn’t look that well. Maybe they’ve lost some energy versus what they’ve had in the past. So, yeah, you’ve got to have food stuffs taken in regularly because of the way the horse’s gastrointestinal tract is maintained and they’ve got to have food on a regular basis. I mean, they’re really built to have food available to them quite regularly and when they get away from this pattern that you have reason for concern. You certainly need to investigate as to why this is occurring.

ALEX: And it’s a concern from a Thoroughbred trainer’s standpoint, that Thoroughbreds train five or six days a week. If we have a horse that has a poor appetite, then it’s an alarm. We want to find out the reason why. And it’s also to a point of helping us in figuring out the horses training patterns. Did I do too much for that horse? Are they regressing a little bit because we did too much training with them? So, there’s that to look at, the horses teeth. Again, know your horse and know exactly why you think it’s possible that they have a poor appetite.