Feed Raw Materials, Nutrition and Feeding of Horses

The learning objective of the course is to provide the students all the essentials to understand the principles of equine nutrition, with both a theoretical and practical approaches, to evaluate the most common feeds in equine nutrition and to recognize the nutritional issues in everyday practice. A further aim of the course is to lead students to acquire knowledge on the most recurrent equine nutritional-related pathologies, providing competences to decrease their incidence through the evaluation of the nutritional adopted plans and the ability to develop new dietary strategies to fulfill the nutritional and requirements of horses. In this view the course will be aimed to improve the equine nutritional skills of the students, providing technicians able to perform diets and concentrates for horses and to manage both with the equine feed industry and the horse owners.

The expected learning outcomes at the end of the course will be related to the improvement of the knowledge and skills to analyze the adopted nutritional plans for equines, developing the ability to define new specific diets and concentrates that fulfill the nutritional requirements and the management condition of each farm. Moreover, the student will develop a critic approach to the different aspects of equine nutrition and dietetics, with the improvement of the ability to interpret the obtained results from diets formulation and nutritional plans developed during the course. Further, the student will improve his/her communications skills and the ability continuously update the knowledge on horse nutrition from the activities of preparation and presentation during classes of slides and communications on specific nutritional topics.