Feeding to Reduce Milk Production

QUESTION:

Dear Dr. Worth,

I am aware that under normal weaning circumstances, its common practice to slowly take a mare off any/all hard feed the few weeks leading up to weaning to help reduce milk production.

However, I am wondering what you would recommend doing for the underweight mare...here's the situation.
 

Queenie, 21 year old QH mare, usually pretty easy keeper, but with age has been needing more maintenance. She usually drags down a little bit when her foals reach about 5 months of age, but nothing drastic. Until Saturday had 5
5 month filly at side. Due to some bad management, Queenie has lost a lot of weight

Queenie is at LEAST 2-300 lbs underweight, and her filly (Luna) is thriving at 5.5 mos of age, and beating up on mom, so we weaned this weekend. We were trying to make it to 6 months, but it just wasn't going to happen -- even if Queenie wasn't in such poor condition, she was already weaning Luna, so we decided to go ahead and do it for her. What would you feed a mare in this condition during weaning? Would her body go ahead and divert the food energy/nutrients from milk production to body maintenance/repair just by decreasing the demand for milk (weaning), or is she still going to need to be taken off all concentrated feed to dry up her milk?

She is currently (or was prior to weaning) on:

-3 lbs diet balancer pellets

-3/4 lb high fat supplement

-1 lb BOSS

We had already started the weaning process by separating her and the filly during the day, so for the past week during the day (about 8 hours) she has been on a medium quality pasture...good grass, just not much of it, and at night had free-choice access to medium quality local grass hay. Since we have completely weaned she is on the pasture 24/7, and offered some hay every couple days (still not eating any of it b/c of amount of grass left).

Her bag is huge now and looks painful but not sure if I should take her off grains and leave her on hay until she's dry or add more for weight gain. I thought maybe just taking out the fat supplement and some of the BOSS would be the best route so that she is still getting SOME calories, but not as nearly as many as she has been getting -- ideas? recommendations?

Thanks for any input!


ANSWER:

She needs to come off any grain for as long as it takes to dry up the milk, she'll lose a tiny bit more weight but in the long run it is easier to deal with the loss of weight than the mastitis she might get if you keep her fed and the milk production up.

Keep an eye on that bag and it it gets too painful call you vet for some help for her. But don't feed her too much until it goes down. Good hay or pasture, ration balancer, and some of the hi fat feed but minimal grain.




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