Donald R Kapper, Retired Professional Animal Scientist
Don Kapper is a highly experienced equine nutritionist who served 24 years with Buckeye Equine Nutrition as their Equine Nutritionist, then Sr. Vice-President; and 12 years as the Director of Nutrition and Technical Services for Progressive Nutrition and their ‘VeterinaryCare’ line; and then 1 year as Equine Technical Consultant for the Cargill Equine Enterprise Team, before retiring in 2015. He was a guest speaker on Nutrition four different years at the AAEP Annual Meetings, and at different University Veterinary Science Departments within the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, France and The Netherlands.
Don and his wife Dee have bred, raised and shown Hanoverian Horses at their Outer Banks Farm in Beach City, Ohio. Their OBX Bred horses have garnished many awards over the years at the AHS Inspections, including: several Top Foals of the Day, AHS Futurity Champion, Elite & Hanoverian Premium Mare’s, Mare Performance Champion, “The Benchmark Farm Perpetual Award” winner for earning the highest combined jumping score of 9.0 during the MPT, Runner-Up for the “Engler-Friedlander Trophy”, and “Horse of the Year”; as well as class winners at Dressage at Devon, including: ‘Born in the USA, Breeders Award’ for breeding and showing the highest scoring Filly in 2016.
INTRODUCTION
This Library is open to the public in hopes of helping all horse owners, managers, and trainers understand the importance of Nutrition according to the amount of stress your horse is realizing, including: prenatal and lactation needs for all mares; the growing needs of all young horses, based on how fast they are growing; and the needs of all performance horses, based on their level of training.
One of the best features of this Library is the fact it will be updated as new research is published on nutrition, as opposed to printing it in a book. Print-out the ‘Charts’ to keep in your feed room and use them everyday to determine your Performance Horses ‘Heat Stress Score’ plus their daily training level to determine how many ounces of a Performance Electrolyte to administer, or the ‘Growth Monitoring Chart’ to enable you to follow your young horses rate of growth every month to determine their nutrient needs to support their rapidly growing skeletal structures and soft tissue development, etc.
Because horses mature into continuous grazers and hindgut fermenters, their Total Diets should contain between 60% to 90% forage. Therefore, it is important to know what nutrients are in your forage (hay and pasture), so you can add the other 10% to 40% of their diet as a Ration Balancer, a Growth or Performance Feed to make up the difference between what nutrients are in your forage and what your horse needs every day to support their physiological status, while maintaining their ideal body weight and muscle, tendon, ligament, etc., development.
