Hay! Pick Me

Overview

Objectives/Goals My project is about finding what hay horses prefer. I believe that if I put a horse in an arena for five minutes and watch him eat three different hays, oat hay, grass hay, and alfalfa, then I believe the horse will prefer alfalfa. Methods/Materials To test my objective, I got five horses, and one at a time I put them in an arena for five minutes using a timer. I evenly spaced three types of hay; oat hay, grass hay, and alfalfa in a small arena. I let the horse graze and with a stopwatch I recorded how long he ate each hay. I repeated this with each horse ten times. Results My hypothesis was proven correct. The five horses ate alfalfa 70%-94% of the time. They ate grass hay for 2%-18% of the time, and oat hay for 0%-0.3% of the time. For 3.7%-12% of the time they did other things in the arena, like roll and walk around. Conclusions/Discussion I expected that the horses would want to eat the grass hay since their ancestors roamed the prairies, but after researching the subject and completing my project, it was proven that horses prefer what they are fed on a daily basis. This project could help horse owners decide what hay is best for their horses, and find the most cost-efficient way to meet their needs. This is especially important in these times of economic struggle. This project also helps owners know what hay their horses like so that their horses will eat the hay and not pick up destructive habits that would make owners pay even more for repairs.

Competition history

• CSEF 2012 Mammalian Biology · Entry J1224

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Animal Sciences projects
• CSEF Animal Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2012 project