A Comparison of Three Conventional Horse Feeders with the Pre-Vent Feeder

This study compared a feeder with molded cups on the bottom (Pre-Vent feeder) with a commonly used rubber tub and hanging bucket feeder to determine differences in time spent eating and feed wastage. Nine Quarter Horse geldings were fed a 12% crude protein pellet diet at 0.75% body weight twice daily from one of the three feeders twice daily for 3 days, and then switched to the next feeder, following a 3 × 3 replicated Latin square design (n = 9). The horses spent more time eating from the cup feeders (31.15 ± 1.43 minutes) than from bucket (19.39 ± 0.42 minutes) and tub (18.87 ± 0.49 minutes, P < .0001) feeders. When fed from cup feeder, horses dropped significantly less feed (3.2 ± 0.52%) of their ration than when fed from bucket (10.2 ± 1.75%) and from tub (7.0 ± 1.32%, P = .001) feeders. When the most wasteful horse was fed from the cup feeder, he lost a mean of 8.7% of his ration, compared with 32.8% when fed from the bucket, and 26.2% when fed from the tub feeders. The cup design is useful for increasing time spent eating and reducing feed wastage.