Can Eating From A Haynet Be Detrimental To My Horse?

Horses have evolved over millennia, and so their diets and eating habits have had to change too. As horses evolved from shrub-browsers to trickle feeding herbivores, they needed large, flat teeth for grinding forage.

- Farryn Day

A horse’s teeth are therefore designed to cope with the continual grinding of tough leaves and stems and, to assist the grinding process, the upper jaw is wider than the lower jaw. The horse chews in a side-to-side motion – meaning that the upper and lower teeth glide across one another, and in wild horses the wear on either side of the mouth is relatively even.

When out grazing, a horse’s natural feeding posture would be with a low head and neck, moving slowly and constantly, and remaining relatively straight throughout the spine. This posture allows the molars of the upper and lower jaw to meet evenly and, in this position, little to no strain is placed on the body.