It appears that sugar not only affects the behavior and learning of human children.

An interesting study from Montana State University finds that young horses may be easier to train if they temporarily lay off the sweets.

Horses are fed a mixture of corn, oats, barley and molasses — sometimes called “sweet grain” or “sweet feed” — to give them a glossy coat and lively spirit that makes them attractive to prospective buyers.

However the extra energy provided by sweet grain during the early stages of training made the horses in MSU’s study more disobedient and fearful than horses that only ate hay,said Jan Bowman, an animal nutritionist at MSU. The sweet grain-eaters spent more time resisting the saddle. They startled easier. They bucked and ran more during training.

“Results suggest that trainers under time constraints could increase their training effectiveness during the early stages of training by not feeding excess dietary energy,” Wade Black, a horse trainer at MSU, wrote in a paper that will be submitted later this year to the “Journal of Animal Science.”

The study involved 12 closely-related quarter horses that came from one Idaho ranch, Bowman said. Black trained the horses for three weeks. Half the horses ate only hay. The hay was a mixture of grass and alfalfa. The other horses ate five pounds of sweet grain a day in addition to the hay. Both groups ate as much hay and drank as much water as they wanted.

Each horse was monitored for heart rate and activity level during the3 study. Black trained the animals for 30 or 40 minutes a day without knowing which animal had eaten grain and which one hadn’t, Bowman said. She and Black then recorded heart rates and the number of steps the horses took during training. HTHe horses were scored on behaviors like obedience, get-up-and-go and separation anxiety.

Horses that ate both grain and hay became more upset when they were separated from the herd, Bowman said. They whinnied more and were livelier and less submissive than the horses that ate only hay.

The study doesn’t mean that trainers should keep grain away from horses forever, Bowman said. They might consider withholding it just during the early weeks of training.

“We don’t want to give the impression that you should starve them in order to enhance their good behavior,” Bowman said. “That’s not the point of it.”

 ”Horses, being ridden by less experienced riders, need to be calm and easy to handle, characteristics that may be enhanced by more effective early training.”, said Wade.

Source
Montana State University