KidZone Animals
Horses: Dinner
Horses are always grazing. Some adult males can eat over twenty pounds of food a day! And like a lot of us, they love to eat sweet foods.
They don't call them "road apples" for nothing!
A horse's primary "natural" diet consists of grasses and softer, easily digestible plants. Pasture grasses, hay, oats, flax seed, and beet pulp are recognized food options for horses, especially and most frequently for domesticated horses. In moderation, treats like apples, carrots, and so on are commonly given to tamed horses by their caretakers.
Unlike humans, horses are herbivores and will often outright reject bitter or sour flavours. Horses need to maintain a diet that is high in fibre, with small portion sizes eaten regularly throughout the day. The length of a horse's digestive tract and the complexity of a horse’s digestive system mean that horses spend basically all day eating.
"Grazing at Sunset" by Tambako the Jaguar;
used with permission under CC BY 2.0
And if horses devote most of their time to eating sweet, fibrous foods, then as you can probably guess, horses create a lot of dung! (Again, the road apples thing.) They have a small stomach and an extremely long digestive tract, relative to the size of a human's, so they are always eating and pooping and eating and...
Pooping is the only way horses release toxins from their bodies, however. It is physically impossible for a horse to vomit! And while this sounds really quite lovely, horses can pick up a lot of serious digestive problems if they are not getting the proper nutrients.
While it is often said that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away," horses that eat too many sweets can experience issues when digesting their meals. Thus, because they are grazing animals, they should probably stick to grazing on yummy grass and hay.