Haynets are often utilized when feeding horses to minimize hay loss. The nets prevent horses walking through, lying in, or otherwise sullying the hay; once the hay has been dirtied, most horses will not eat it.
Horses are biologically designed to put down their heads to graze, so asking the horse to eat out of a hanging net can create unique stresses on his head and neck. Some horses exert a lot of force to pull the hay free of the net, even pulling the haynet up and away from the wall.
British researchers created two experiments to determine how much pressure horses applied to get the forage out of a hay net. Six study horses ate out of hay nets and wore pressure sensors while being recorded for video evaluation.
The first experiment measured posture and pressure in Newtons (10 Newtons equals 2.25 pounds of force) that the horses exerted on a single- or double-layered haynet holding 6.6 pounds of hay, hung either low or high.
The research team discovered that the average and maximum pull forces were higher for the double haynet and the nets that were hung lower were pulled on harder.
The second experiment used 10 horses eating from hay nets holding just over 13 pounds of hay or haylage attached to a wall at one or two points. The scientists found that pull pressure was 1.6 times higher in horses eating haylage than hay. The highest recorded pull pressure was nearly 106 pounds.
Continually exerting this much force to eat hay could have detrimental effects on neck muscles, as well as on the horse's dental health in the long run, the researchers concluded.
The scientists also determined that the type of forage in the haynet had the greatest effect on pull strength. Horses that ate haylage out of the net exerted significantly more pull force than those eating hay: over 50 percent of the former's pulls were higher than 50 Newtons (11.2 pounds).
Though horses pulled harder to get to the hay in the double hay nets, the overall increase was not extreme, at around 25 percent, researchers reported. This was markedly lower than the maximum pressure horse exerted when trying to eat haylage from a single haynet.
The type of hay also affects how hard a horse must work to get it free. Hay that is cut and easily broken allows for multiple, small, grazing-like bites; horses ate hay 63 percent slower than they did haylage, which was longer and more stemmy. The use of double hay nets for hay may be beneficial to slow hay intake while not requiring an abundance of additional pressure to be placed on the horse's body.
Additional study conclusions included: haynets that were hung higher reduced the pressure horse's exerted while eating, possibly through gravity, and that horse owners should avoid feeding silage out of double hay nets for extended periods of time.
Further research is needed to determine the effects of hay nets on equine body posture.
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