Putting Muscle back on Miniature horses

Lets say you have a mini horses that had gotten sick, or gotten thin for some reason and you want to put some muscle back on. Fist step is to look at why your hoses has lost the muscle in the first place, and in the case of sickness you first need to solve the cause. Only a healthy horse will build muscle. So if we are looking at a horse that is older, 25 to 30 area and older, then there is a good chance that there is nothing you can do. Just like people, the older you are the harder it is to get the beer gut off and the muscle back in. In younger animals fist find the reason for the wight loss.



From there you need to poor in the grain and high molasses to build up the body fat. You can't build muscle without body fat to feed the muscle. With illnesses taken care of and an appropriate diet you need an exercise program. With a high protean and sugar diet going on you horses is going to be full of all kinds of vinegar. Your going to need to work that energy out of them and use it to do a good work out for your animal. A horses natural state is to lazily walk and eat and walk and eat. They will not work themselves out so you need to be a personal trainer to provide motivation. Try lunging them. Start at 5 min for a week and work your way up to 20. After 20 minutes you will burn muscle rather than build. You can add weighted boots to get them to work on their leg action. You can do jumping and hurtles. There are all kinds of horse activates that you can do with them all you need to do is get creative. When Ferrand Triple K Farms used to show we would get the 4-wheeler going and have them trot along side while we went along our country roads. Then when we got into cart we would let them pull the carts on less frequented roads.

And like I said, with our senior horses there isn't a lot you can do unless you have that one very strange one that is Hercules their whole lives. The best you can do is to love them, keep a good fat content on them so they will stay warm, keep the mineral blocks close at hand and salt blocks, even think about separating them out and adding electrolytes to their water, and love them. Some of our seniors can go for years being thin and having lost their muscle, others it means that the end is near.