Equine gastric ulcer syndrome (EGUS) is a major equine health problem worldwide. Multiple studies have reported a 90% incidence rate of ulcers in performance horses.
Ulcers negatively and sometimes severely affect a horse’s ability to perform. They cause pain and discomfort. They may reduce your horse’s appetite which in turn limits their capacity to maintain bodyweight and ulcers can lead to the development of vices like windsucking and crib biting.
As horse owners we often give ourselves a really hard time for not doing ‘the right thing’ for our horses. This blog post was originally inspired by a conversation with a gorgeous friend whose pony had gotten laminitis.
At the time, my friend was distraught and feeling horribly guilty that she had ‘let this happen’!
Yep, they do!
In looking at 13 pasture samples from one farm it is very clear that the higher the NSC content, the higher the digestible energy (calorie) content.
The pastures shown here were all sampled between 11 am and 2 pm on the same day. They were all dried at the same time and all were analyzed by Equi-Analytical.
Check out our latest tips to keep your horse happy and healthy. Because there’s always more to learn about keeping horses at their best!
As horse owners we often give ourselves a really hard time for not doing ‘the right thing’ for our horses. This blog post was originally inspired by a conversation with a gorgeous friend whose pony had gotten laminitis.
At the time, my friend was distraught and feeling horribly guilty that she had ‘let this happen’!
Yep, they do!
In looking at 13 pasture samples from one farm it is very clear that the higher the NSC content, the higher the digestible energy (calorie) content.
The pastures shown here were all sampled between 11 am and 2 pm on the same day. They were all dried at the same time and all were analyzed by Equi-Analytical.
Is copra meal a good feed for horses?! This has to be one of the most common questions I have been asked in my career.
Copra meal is made from the flesh of the coconut after a lot of the oil has been extracted. As an ingredient, it tends to divide people, with some horse owners loving it and some not a fan.
What do I think of copra meal? Let’s dig into that…
There is a very good reason the saying “You eat like a horse” exists;
Horses. Eat. A. Lot!!!
The amount of forage you feed your horse has a HUGE impact on the health, welfare, behaviour, gut health and performance of your horse as well as your horse’s risk of diseases like colic and gastric ulcers.
As horse owners, one thing we LOVE is when our horses are well muscled! It looks beautiful AND it is also very functional!
Our horse’s need their muscles for speed, strength and agility. Muscle also provides stability and balance and a whole host of really important metabolic functions like the storage and utilization of glucose.
Weanlings are funny little creatures, endlessly curious, prone to mischief and constantly walking the tricky balance between growing fast enough to achieve their genetic potential but not growing so fast that they end up with bone or joint disease.
And because of this balance that must be achieved between growth and skeletal health, their nutrition can be challenging.
Did you know that horses WILL NOT show you they are in pain until the pain is so bad they can no longer hide it!
Why? Because they are prey animals. And if you’ve ever watched a David Attenborough documentary you will know that the old, sick or injured are the ones that get EATEN! So if you are a prey animal and you are old, sick or injured, you hide it for as long as you can… so you don’t get eaten.
Abstract: Cereal grains do not form part of the natural diet of equines, however, results from an initial survey conducted, suggest that horses in the Australian thoroughbred industry are currently being fed on average about 7 kg of grain concentrate/day. Horses are not well equipped to digest the starch from cereal grains in the small intestine and as a consequence, the hindgut fermentation of starch, which may lead to hindgut lactic acidosis and diseases such as laminitis, is an evident problem in the thoroughbred industry.
Feeding a horse confined to a stable is a balancing act! You need to balance between giving them plenty to eat, to keep them chewing, happy and occupied… AND not giving them so much to eat that you have them bursting with energy and climbing the walls. Here is a little help on how to do it!
Cooking cereal grains before you feed them to your horse is absolutely essential (with the exception of oats).
Cooking improves how easy the starch inside the grain is to digest. The starch (the white stuff you can see in the middle of the grain) is the major source of energy contained in grains and it is the single reason we feed cereal grains to horses.
And because cooking improves the small intestinal digestibility of the starch, cooking also drastically reduces the chance of grains negatively affecting the health of your horse’s hindgut.
Oats and horses are well made for one another. Of all of the cereal grains we can feed to horses, oats are the only grain that can be fed safely without being cooked.
Why? For a few reasons… the first is that oats contain less starch than other grains like corn or barley. And, horses can actually digest the starch contained in oats when it is in its natural/raw form in their small intestine. Which means only small amounts of starch will be left undigested and deposited into the hindgut.
As a lover of chestnut horses, and a nutritionist, sunbleaching had frustrated me for YEARS!
My gelding Poet, a stunning almost liver chestnut in the spring, would bleach to a homeless looking colour by the end of our hot summers… leaving me wondering if perhaps his mineral balance wasn’t quite right.
That was until one particularly hot summer when Poet and I did an unintentional experiment over our Christmas break… which seemed to show that the sunbleaching that occurs in some horses over summer is a combination of sun and sweat.
A racing client asked me this recently and it reminded me that when I was studying during my PhD tenure, we had looked at the effect of pre-incubating grains in pH 3.7 equine stomach fluid on the digestion of starch from those grains.
And what we found was that starch from grains that were exposed to equine stomach fluid before being digested by small intestinal enzymes was between 17% (extruded rice) and 104% (cracked triticale) MORE digested than starch that wasn’t exposed to the stomach fluid.
When a horse eats, much of its feed is made up of LARGE carbohydrate, fat and protein molecules. These large pieces of nutrient can’t be absorbed because the gut is designed to only absorb tiny little molecules.
Why? Because if big stuff was able to cross from the gut into your horse’s body all sorts of bacteria, toxins and general muck would pass into the body and cause disease havoc!
Keeping performance horses and particularly endurance horses hydrated can be a massive challenge. And a big part of the challenge is that horses have a rather inconvenient thirst response trigger.
For horses to ‘feel thirsty’ they need a certain level of sodium in their blood. BUT when they drink fresh water, it dilutes their blood sodium and that can switch off their thirst response, even if they are still dehydrated! Which means you can have a dehydrated horse that isn’t actually ‘thirsty’! See … told you it is inconvenient.
Long periods of slow work for racehorses has long been thought of as the best way to ‘leg up’ young horses, preparing them physically for a life of racing.
BUT, three decades of research conducted by Professor Brian Nielsen of Michigan State University and his team and students is telling us, definitively, that we have got it all wrong and that speed is essential for bone health!
There are few equines I respect more than an amazing kid’s horse or pony. The patience these creatures have with their precious little cargo is incredible. And their ability to meet their little riders where they are at is something that always staggers me.
Being a reasonably rare commodity, we want to do everything we can to look after our childrens’ horses and ponies to keep them, fit, mobile, healthy and happy for as long as possible.
Here are my 5 best tips for feeding your child’s mount.
As a rider, it really is hard to top the feeling of a ride on a horse with beautiful calm, yet responsive energy. And for most of us, there is nothing quite as unnerving or unenjoyable as riding a horse that is completely full of itself and constantly reacting before thinking.
Well… it depends! If your horse is light in condition and possibly losing some weight and feels tired and lazy then yes, feeding more is probably the solution. BUT! If your horse is overweight or gaining weight, more feed is not the answer to overcoming your horse feeling tired or lazy when being ridden.
The gut health of our equines plays a significant role in determining how healthy or unhealthy our horses will be. The equine digestive tract is a large and relatively complex system. Your horse’s health depends on how well you look after this digestive system and importantly, how well the microbial population within it remains “balanced”.
