Abstract
Feeding horses high levels of cereal starch can result in diet-related azoturia, laminitis and colic, whereas high fibre, forage-based diets do not generally elicit these conditions. Therefore, it would be advantageous to develop fibrous feeds with increased digestibilities, permitting horses with high energy demands to be sustained on greater forage: cereal starch ratios. High temperature dried (HT) alfalfa has been fed to horses for a number of years and it is common practise to combine this with sugar beet pulp (SB) another nutritious fibrous feed for horses. Synergistic effects of SB when added to fibre-based diets have been observed in other species in vivo (Longland et al., 1994) whereby the digestibility of graminaceous feeds has been increased. However, such effects have been little examined in horses fed a leguminous-forage diet. The aim of this study therefore, was to determine if SB enhanced the digestibility of alfalfa, a forage legume that is increasingly being fed to equines in the UK.
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