equine
wellness Your natural resource!
SPECIAL ISSUE Show & performance horses Get the
competitive edge... through diet!
Coping with
show nerves
Saddlefit for women
9 tools for the best fit
Flower power Easing equine emotions
Unwanted behaviors? How to turn them around
Help for heaves May/June 2008 Display until June 24, 2008
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VOLUME 3 ISSUE 3
How to
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Photo: Joanne Panizzera
contents
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Š Andi Berger – Fotolia.com
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features
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An earth-friendly approach to pasture management The key is to keep your land healthy
18
Coping with show nerves
24
Top 3 tips for show ring shine... naturally!
equine wellness
Competitive edge
33
Saddlefit for women
40
Breathing easy
How to stay calm and collected
It takes more than bathing and blanketing
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Feeding the high performance horse
9 tools to help you find the best fit
Help for horses with heaves
40
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Click on this icon to visit featured links 48 Vice versa
How to turn around those unwanted behaviors
52 Flower power
Gentle healing essences ease equine emotions
60 Horseplay!
Games that challenge your equine partner and strengthen your bond
64 A wholistic perspective on pain relief
Healthy ways to help her feel better
68 Saving Freeway... Horse rescue 101
72 Hot stuff
Preventing heat stress in horses
equine wellness
Competitive
edge
by Joyce Harman, DVM
Feeding the high performance horse
The topic of feeding horses is often surrounded by tradition, mystique, and a lot of hype. Out of all this mystery comes very little in the way of fact. One of the most important things to remember in feeding your horse is that each one is an individual. Just because one horse needs several pounds of feed to maintain his weight and performance, doesn’t mean your own horse needs the same. For example, one of my clients had an endurance horse that carried a heavyweight rider to many 100-mile competitions. When they had to feed him a “lot of food”, he was really only receiving one cup of grain twice a day, compared to one cup once a day when he wasn’t working. In comparison, most other
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equine wellness
horses competing in 100-milers require many pounds of feed each day.
Forage
Horses were designed by nature to be foraging animals. This means they were made to graze on whatever scrub, grass and weeds were available for the greater part of the day. They also moved constantly, except for relatively short periods spent sleeping. If they became ill, a wide selection of weeds (herbs) was available to help solve their health problems.
Today, commercialized nutrition and cultivated pastures have changed equine nutrition habits from rough forage to processed feeds and rich grass. The competition horse is often fed most of his calories in the form of concentrates or grain, with proportionally less forage and hay.
Hint
Avoid hays on which the herbicide Grazon® has been used. It will persist in a manure pile for five years after the horse has eaten it. The optimum way to feed horses is to use organically grown products. These are rare, but becoming increasingly available. Many roughages (hay) are
grown with chemicals (fertilizers and herbicides), and the purchaser often has no knowledge of which farm a certain shipment came from, and what chemicals have been used.
Carbohydrates
When carbohydrates are fed in large quantities, they pass through the small intestine too quickly, and land in the large intestine where the bacteria are not prepared to handle the digestion. Fermentation or improper digestion occurs, resulting in ulcers and poor absorption of vitamins and minerals. The horse then becomes nutrient deficient and has an inflamed digestive tract. Feeding antacids to change the pH in the stomach does nothing to help the large intestine. If the gut needs support, it is best to use an herbal product that helps heal the gut wall, and probiotics to keep the bacteria healthy.
Vitamins and minerals
Mineral balance is perhaps even more critical than vitamin balance in a horse’s diet. A complex interaction takes place between many minerals, and even a slight excess of one can mean another may not be absorbed. Trace minerals are a catalyst to help break major minerals down into a form that can be utilized. Horses will naturally select from free-choice minerals if the mixture does not have salt added (feed the salt as a separate item).
require only 7.5% to 12% protein as an adult. The lowest percentage of protein found in commercial feed is 10%; in fact, it’s common to see protein levels of 14% to 16% in feed. Since horses are made to live primarily on roughage, there is no physiological reason to have protein levels so high. High performance horses usually eat more grain, so if they need slightly more protein they will usually get it from the increase in grain volume. Feeding excess protein is toxic, since it has to be converted to energy. The by-product of that is nitrogen, which is excreted by the kidney. Young animals can digest protein better and can use it to grow muscle, especially when working and growing at the same time. Except for some Thoroughbreds, however, most young performance horses have little need for high protein diets.
According to the National Research Council (NRC) nutrition tables, horses
Hint
A horse of healthy weight should just have his ribs showing; most show horses are more than 100 pounds overweight. Excess weight puts more strain on the joints and leads to long term health problems such as insulin resistance.
Certain individual horses have a greater requirement for protein and can benefit from the addition of protein to their diet. If your horse is losing weight despite a good feeding program and you are sure no ulcers are present, consider raising the protein level.
Holistically minded owners with a few extra dollars to spend will do well by buying cold pressed oils and mixing them into the feed. Once a horse needs more calories than can be obtained from three to six pounds of grain per day, oils can be added up to about one cup per day. Corn oil may be the cheapest, but rice bran, flax and hemp are much better because they contain desirable Omega 3 fatty acids. Never feed animal fats to your horse.
Energy
Concentrates
Horses eating good quality pasture or hay can take in all the nutrient energy they need from the forage. Concentrates (grain) should only be fed to make up the extra energy required by the horse to perform his job or maintain weight, if he has a high metabolic rate.
Most horses with plenty of minerals available do not need electrolytes added to their food, except for long distance types of competition such as endurance riding or upper level eventing. In this case, start feeding electrolytes about 24 to 48 hours beforehand to hydrate the intestinal tract and give the horse a reserve of electrolytes.
Protein
carbohydrates, which can make some horses jittery. However, fats in commercial feeds are routinely preserved with chemicals and are extracted using solvent processes.
Fats
Fats are an excellent addition to the performance horse’s diet because they increase calories without adding excess
Horse feeds are becoming more and more processed, to the point where there are now extruded feeds that
Gut physiology
Horses use acid digestion in the stomach and fermentation digestion in the cecum. The stomach acid digests protein, while the small intestine digests fat and carbohydrates. The cecum is perhaps the most important part of the digestive tract – it is designed to digest long stem fiber through fermentation. When a horse is fed mostly concentrates in the form of grain and very little long stem fiber (hay), the cecum is only partially filled, and this can predispose the horse to colic. equine wellness
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