In some stables, you get the feeling that beavers are kept there and not horses: The tying up post is a shadow of its former self, the walls in the open stable have been gnawed away over a large area. The supporting beams of the stable roof have already been gnawed away to a load-bearing minimum… What is this all about?
When horses are hungry
The first thing you should always check is whether the horses are getting enough roughage.
Feeding in rations with long breaks (“otherwise they’ll just get too fat”), open stables with more horses than feeding places (“musical-chairs feeding”) or daily winter pen in a paddock attachment stable without any hay feeders (“they can eat inside all night”) ensure that the horses will eat everything out of hunger at some point. If necessary, soil, sand, or faeces in addition to the wood.
Let’s assume that they are kept and fed in an equine-appropriate management. Wood in the form of branches, twigs, bark, or roots is also a normal part of the diet of well-fed domestic horses, as well as wild horses.
Different upbringings can play a part
The requirement can vary slightly from breed to breed and from horse to horse, which often is linked with how they were fed during their upbringings. For example, horses from Spain often have a significantly higher wood fibre requirement and therefore often eat all of their straw bedding.
They are used to a high proportion of wood fibre in their diet from being brought up in dry Spain. Quite the opposite to a Warmblood from the Friesian marshlands.
In contrast to cellulose, wood fibre makes no significant contribution to energy production. It is a dietary fibre, i.e. it is largely excreted unchanged at the back end. But still, it is important in an equine-appropriate diet.
The purpose of the digestive system is to break down food components so that they can be absorbed through the intestinal wall and made available to the metabolism. For this reason, great importance is always placed on nutrient content when calculating feed rations.
Fibre is often underestimated
Fibre, on the other hand, is largely ignored, even though it is partly responsible for ensuring that nutrients can be properly utilised in the first place. They are (largely) indigestible components of food, but their structure ensures that the motor function of the intestine, i.e. peristalsis, is stimulated and regulated.
Only if the food bolus is transported forwards at exactly the right speed – i.e. neither too quickly nor too slowly – can the food components be broken down and made available for the body.
For humans, practically all types of fibre are considered dietary fibre, i.e. pectins, cellulose, hemicellulose and also lignin (wood fibre). In horses, however, most fibres can be digested in the large intestine by the intestinal symbionts located there.
Only the wood fibre is virtually indigestible for horses and therefore acts as pure fibre. Added to the feed in the right quantity, this wood fibre ensures that the food bolus is moved forwards. But not too quickly, so that nutrients and water can be sufficiently extracted.
Eating wood fibre is therefore a completely natural part of the diet: be it in the form of bushes or trees in the paddock, which are readily “trimmed”, straw, which is more than just bedding for horses, or gnawing on the stable buildings when no other sources of wood fibre are available.
Bark also offers advantages
It can also be observed that horses will skilfully peel off and eat the bark of trees and bushes, as well as branches and twigs that are placed in the paddock. Bark often contains bitter substances that also have a regulating effect on peristalsis. In addition, many plants contain active substances in their bark, e.g. the well-known acetylsalicylic acid in willow bark. In addition, bark also contributes to the supply of minerals and trace elements, as do the leaves, which are often nibbled first, with great enthusiasm.
Leaves provide minerals, trace elements and humic acids in addition to fibre
If you go for a walk in the forest, you can observe that horses not only like to nibble on the branches, but sometimes also dig out leaves from under the snow and eat them. In addition to the fibre content, leaves provide many minerals and trace elements. Furthermore, at this time of year it is often slightly rotten and therefore contains a high proportion of humic acids.
It is assumed that humic acids have a regulating effect on the intestinal environment and can counteract malfermentation processes. They also appear to be able to bind glyphosate, which horses can absorb via their straw or hay harvested directly next to grain fields, for example.
Tooth abrasion can also be the cause of wood gnawing
The fact that many horses usually start gnawing more wood at the end of winter could also have another reason other than intestinal regulation. In contrast to grazing, eating hay does not wear down the incisors sufficiently. Despite the lack of wear, however, they are pushed further out of the jaw.
After some time, it can happen that the molars no longer come together sufficiently during the grinding process, making it increasingly difficult to chew the hay.
If you observe horses in February or March, you will often see them literally gnawing on the wood with their incisors. Sometimes even without the wood being eaten.
Presumably they are trying to achieve a certain amount of tooth wear so that the chewing process can be fully affective. Whether this is the case would be an exciting topic for a scientific study.
Conclusion
The fact that horses eat wood fibres in the form of twigs, bark, leaves and straw and, if necessary, stable equipment, is a normal process. Horses really appreciate if they get given branches or twigs from a walk in the woods or if you generously provide them with pruned branches from fruit trees, willows or similar non-toxic trees that may be growing in the surrounding area.
However, you should make absolutely sure that they do not gnaw on chemically treated wood (stable buildings, fence posts, old boundary railway sleepers or former telephone poles aka tying up posts). In contrast to wood fibre, the wood preservatives used for this purpose are anything but healthy.
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