The time budget is the amount of time an animal spends doing the things it has to do throughout theday. Feral/wild animals including equines have been studied in order to discover what the ‘time-budget’ is for thatparticular species.

Not surprisingly animals that are predators and animals that are prey differ in the amount of time that they spendcarrying out daily maintenance activities. The time budget of most predators involves short periods of high activity(to catch and eat prey) and long periods of inactivity i.e. sleeping, to digest the high calorie prey they haveeaten. A prime example is your pet dog, notice how many hours he sleeps when you are not actually interacting withhim.

Herbivores are different to carnivores because they have to be alert most of the time (watching and listening forpredators) and they have to eat for a much larger part of the day. Compared to a meat eater their food is low incalories and takes a long time to chew and digest. Horses have one of the longest grazing periods of grass eatingherbivores such as cows and sheep because they do not ruminate (regurgitate and re chew their food). Instead a horseferments food in the hind gut while grazing. This means that a horse is mainly on its feet, ready to flee and is notweighed down by large quantities of undigested forage.

Studies have shown that the daily time budget of feral/wild horses comprises:

Grazing – between 12-20 hours a day
Sleeping - between 2-6 hours a day
Loafing – between 2-6 hours a day

Time Spent Grazing
In the natural state the total time spent grazing is usually spread out throughout the day and night with bouts ofsleeping and loafing being interspersed. The length of time spent grazing depends on the quality of the grassavailable. On better quality grass the horse will spend less time grazing and more time sleeping and loafing. Whenthe grass is poor such as in a drought, the horse will increase the grazing time up to as much as twenty hours (ifany feed is available). In this case loafing is not a priority and the horse would pretty much just eat and sleep.This ability to increase its grazing/browsing time is a factor that makes horses such a successful animal in toughclimates.

Time Spent Sleeping
Adult horses usually sleep for approximately four hours per day. Roughly two hours are spent sleeping lying down andtwo hours are spent sleeping standing up. Due to the large thorax of the horse it actually uses less energy to sleepstanding than lying down. Lying down rests the legs but the lungs have to work hard when the horse is stretched outon its side. This is why a horse often makes a groaning noise when prone, as breathing is quite an effort in thisposition. As mentioned in the previous section, sleep is in bouts, interspersed with grazing and loafing. Forexample the horse might sleep lying down for 15 minutes and then graze some more and so on.

Time Spent Loafing
Loafing is a term that is used to group all the other things that horses do with their day. It includes suchactivities as mutual grooming, playing and simply standing around together. Younger horses spend more time thanolder horses playing. Older horses spend more time standing around than younger horses (in this respect horses arenot unlike humans!)

An understanding of the time budget of the horse is important for the welfare of the horse. By looking at thenatural time budget we can see that a horse should spend at least 12 hours a day just chewing its food. Modern dayhorse management has resulted in many horses being confined and fed meals that are high in energy but low in fibre.This results in long periods of time where the horse has nothing to do as these types of feed are eaten much morequickly (due to being more energy dense). This can cause problems, either behavioural, physiological or both.Therefore a confined horse should be fed a diet that is as close to natural as possible. High fibre forage such asgrass hay takes a long time to eat and digest and therefore occupies the horse for much longer and keeps the gutfunctioning as it should, reducing the incidence of problems such as colic and gastric ulcers.

Another factor to bear in mind is that natural living horses live in herds. As well as grazing together they ‘loaf’and sleep as a group. The horse is never alone by choice. Again modern management systems do not always take thisfact into consideration and the result, coupled with a diet that is too low in fibre is often stereotypic behavioursuch as cribbing and weaving.

Knowledge of time budgets can also help with grazing management. Because we know that horses intersperse grazingbouts with sleeping and loafing bouts we can manipulate this behaviour so that the horse grazes when in the paddockand loafs/sleeps when in a yard or stable. Therefore if grass is limited allow horses to graze as a herd in bouts ofthree to four hours at a time, two or three times per day. The rest of the time the horses spend in yards or stableswith access to hay thus conserving the pasture by reducing grazing and hoof pressure.

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