“Pellets are just made from sweepings off the floor”, “You can’t feed a nervous horse grain”, these are but a couple of the countless wives’ tales concerning the feeding of horses. Almost everyone involved with horses has been exposed to these tidbits of wisdom that “everyone that has fed a horse surely knows.” There are more of these anecdotal, pseudo-true myths surrounding horse feeding than with any other class of livestock including man. Where do these truisms come from, are they founded in any fact, why do they persist and does it really matter? In this article we would like to discuss a number of the more prevalent myths and wives’ tales and “set the record straight”. We might as well start with the oldest and most common of them all!
“Bran mashes”
Many horse people have been force fed the notion that there is nothing better for a horse than a bran mash. Bran mashes are made in a number of ways and one could write a pretty lengthy book entitled “recipes from around the world for bran mashes.” Most of these mashes have at least one thing in common, they contain wheat bran. Most are made with hot water, wheat bran, perhaps some oats or barley or even some sweet feed or boiled linseed, molasses and chaff,.
Wheat bran has been thought to have a laxative or mild cathartic effect. Research has failed to indicate that this is the case with horses. A study conducted at Cornell University in which 50% wheat bran was added to a diet of hay and grain found that faecal moisture was similar between horses receiving wheat
bran and those on the bran free control diet. Furthermore, the digestibility of wheat bran was not affected by soaking in warm water.
When asked why they feed wheat bran, many reply that it’s because of the ‘good fibre’ content. Indeed bran is higher in fibre than, say, corn. But oats are actually higher in fibre and certainly all hays are higher in fibre than bran.
So if bran is not a laxative, does not contribute significantly to fibre intake and does not impact positively on faecal moisture, is there any positive side to the practice of feeding a bran mash? Bran is usually quite palatable to horses and so may be a good medium for mixing up some supplement powders or medications to ensure that the horse eats them.
The water a horse consumes via the bran mash will dampen any dust in the feed and can also boost water replacement in a dehydrated horse, such as a heavy sweating endurance horse, or a horse recovering from illness, providing some insurance in terms of maintaining hydration. Bran will also provide some nutrients to the horse, though there are usually more effective ways to get this job done and the actual dry weight of bran fed is usually quite small.
In the final analysis, bran mashes are innocuous when fed occasionally as a treat or as an appetite stimulant, but do not provide the “magic” often attributed to them. If a horseman gets a warm fuzzy feeling by doing a bran mash after a hard days work, then they should not be dissuaded, but don’t believe it to be the panacea of good horse management that some circles would have you believe.
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