Have you ever thought about whether the order you feed various things to your horse will make a difference to his health?
Chances are you haven’t.
New research is showing that feeding a small amount of hay before you feed your concentrates/grain reduces the post-feeding inflammatory effect of non-structural carbohydrates (starch and sugars).
In other words:
Feed hay first (about 1 kg, 2.2 lb). And then feed your grains/concentrates.
Researchers from Ohio State University and Virginia Tech have recently published research showing that feeding non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) in amounts of 1.14 g/kg of your horses bodyweight (which roughly equates to 1 kg (2.2 lb) of a 50% NSC feed, 2 kg (4.4 lb) of a 25% NSC feed) causes post-feeding inflammation.
Suggesting that sub-clinical ‘digestive stress’ occurs at much lower levels of intake than that required to cause noticeable physiological changes.
The ‘post-prandial inflammation’ measured was an increase in plasma concentration of interleukin-1b. Interleukin-1β (IL-1β) is a potent pro-inflammatory cytokine. When present in excess, IL-1β will contribute to unhealthy levels of inflammation.
These same researchers have now shown that when you feed 0.91 kg of grass hay (approximately half of a flake/biscuit) before feeding any higher NSC concentrate feeds, the recorded levels of post feeding IL-1β were lower than if horses were fed their concentrate first and then hay!
Feeding hay first also reduces post feeding blood glucose levels
In humans, exposing human intestinal tissue to IL-1β reduces ‘tight junction’ integrity and may be contributing to leaky gut syndrome! This is pretty technical… suffice to say that inflammation in the gut won’t end well (for us, or our horses!).
What should you do?
Make sure your horse is able to graze or eat hay right up to when you feed your concentrates. OR if your horse is meal fed, feed 1 kg (2.2 lb) of hay BEFORE you feed your concentrates.
Combining this practice with also feeding alfalfa (lucerne) before you ride is going to improve your horse’s gut health immensely. And it’s so simple. Hay before you ride, hay before you feed!
These small changes can make such a huge difference to your horse’s health and wellbeing!
As always, if you have any questions about anything to do with feeding and nutrition, head on over to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Group on Facebook, you are so welcome, FeedXL member or not!
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
4 key considerations to reduce the risk of colic in your horse
Colic – It’s a word that sends cold shivers up every horse owners’ spine, and for good reason!
Colic is the single biggest killer of horses worldwide.
With their gastrointestinal tract the way it is, horses are simply prone to developing all sorts of problems with their gut.
BUT…
There are certain conditions that will increase the risk of colic. So there are things we can do to reduce the risk of colic in horses.
Research presented at the European Equine Health & Nutrition Congress, March 2017 (by Lindroth et al) found the following areas of concern are key to reducing the risk of colic in horses:
Change of water source and/or a change of roughage more than twice (though the time period is not specific) doubled the risk of colic.
Horses fed concentrates three times per day had twice the risk of colic compared to horses not fed any concentrates (amounts were not specified though)
Here is the REALLY USEFUL bit: For every 1 kg increase in roughage (forage) per 100 kg bodyweight fed per day, the risk of colic DROPPED by three times!
For every 1 kg increase in muesli feed (composition not specified but would think it contains grains) per 100 kg of bodyweight, the risk of colic INCREASED by three times. Which makes a whole lot of sense, given the more forage we feed and the less concentrate, the closer we are to a horse’s natural diet.
And when we can keep them closer to their natural diet, their gut and overall health is almost always much better!
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
While it’s maybe not the most refined subject, your horse’s manure can tell you a lot. How watery, soft, formed, unformed or hard it is can give you some insight into what is going on inside that gut!
One question that we get a lot is asking what to feed your horse if they have loose manure. Your horse’s manure is an insight to its gut health, so if your horse has loose, watery manure or diarrhea, that’s an indication that something is amiss. If your horse has loose manure, you should first speak with your veterinarian. Once any major problems have been ruled out, you can start to look at feeding and management changes that can help your horse have healthier manure. Sand or dirt accumulation can be one cause of diarrhea. If your horse is turned out or fed in a sandy or dirty area, you can follow our protocol on psyllium to help clear this from the gut. Click here to learn more about psyllium husks. Hindgut acidosis, often caused by feeding unprocessed grains like wheat, corn, or barley to horses, can be another cause of soft manure. Always feed cooked grains in small portions (no more than 1kg/meal for a 500 kg horse) and only feed grains when necessary. Another cause of loose manure is too little fiber in the diet. When there’s not enough effective (indigestible) fibre in the diet, there’s not enough fiber to hold onto water in the hindgut, which leads to soft manure. FeedXL can help you calculate how much fiber your horse is getting and how much it needs.
Use our quick check guide to assess your horse’s manure and see if it is telling you all is well… Or if there is something not right within the gut. Note that the color of the manure will change as what the horse is eating changes. So don’t be too distracted by colour, look instead at the form.
Score 1 – watery diarrhea
Is this normal?
Something is seriously wrong in your horse’s gut. You need to contact your veterinarian immediately!
What causes this?
There are many causes of watery diarrhea. Please work with your veterinarian to achieve a sound diagnosis
How to fix it:
Follow directions from your veterinarian.
Score 2 – diarrhea
Is this normal?
Not normal! Like watery diarrhea, there are many causes of diarrhea in horses. Please work with your veterinarian to isolate the cause.
What causes this?
You should work with your veterinarian to diagnose the cause of your horse’s diarrhea.
How to fix it:
Follow directions from your veterinarian.
Sand and dirt accumulation in the gut is a common cause of diarrhea in horses. If this is the diagnosis, you can follow our protocol for using psyllium to clear this from the gut. Click here to learn more about our psyllium husk protocol.
Score 3 – soft, unformed
Is this normal?
This is a not a normal consistency for horse manure and indicates that something is not right in the gut, particularly the hindgut. The ratio of water to fibre is too high in the manure.
What causes this?
There are many possible causes, including:
hindgut acidosis. If your horse is being fed unprocessed grains like wheat, corn (maize) or barley, large amounts of starch will be fermented in the hindgut. Or your horse may have large amounts of fructan entering the hindgut from ryegrass or cereal (oat, wheat barley) forages. The fermenting starch and/or fructan upsets microbial balance and large amounts of acid accumulate. The acid damages the gut wall, good, fibre fermenting bacteria die and overall health is compromised. Soft manure is a common symptom. You may or may not see whole grains still present in the manure.
sand or dirt accumulation. Sand/dirt irritates the gut wall. A common symptom is soft manure.
too little fibre. When there is not enough effective (indigestible) fibre in the diet, there is not enough fibre to hold onto water in the hindgut, leading to soft manure.
high moisture, low fibre pasture. Lush, young pasture is high in water and low in fibre. Horses will often have soft manure on these pastures due to the high water and low fibre intake. Horses may also eat bark, chew on fence posts or other objects to try and increase fibre intake.
How to fix it:
The solution here depends on the cause.
hindgut acidosis, if grains must be fed, use only cooked grains. Feed grains in small meals (no more than 1 kg/meal for a 500 kg horse; 2lb/meal for an 1100 lb horse). Only use grains when absolutely necessary!
sand or dirt, use psyllium husk to remove from the hindgut. Follow our protocol here.
too little fibre, reassess your horse’s diet and make sure you are feeding a minimum of 1.5% of BW per day in quality forage, preferably as long stem hay, haylage or pasture. For optimum gut health, aim for 2% BW in forage per day.
high moisture, low fibre pasture. If your horse is grazing lush pasture, provide free choice access to a high fibre hay to allow your horse to choose how much fibre to consume.
Score 4 – soft, formed
Is this normal?
This is a normal consistency for manure and indicates your horse is well hydrated and consuming sufficient fibre in the diet. This soft, formed consistency is normally seen when some green pasture is available daily.
Score 5 – firm, formed
Is this normal?
This is a normal consistency for manure and indicates your horse is well hydrated and consuming sufficient fibre in the diet. This firm, formed consistency is common when horses have access to hay or dry pasture.
Score 6 – hard, dry
Is this normal?
This is a not a normal consistency for horse manure and indicates that this horses water intake is low and dehydration may be present. Or it indicates that indigestible fibre intake is too high.
What causes this?
Reduced water intake may be due to:
water that is too cold
dirty, unpalatable water
unfamiliar water (common when traveling)
electrolyte (particularly sodium) deficiency. When sodium levels drop in the blood horses reduce water intake.
water placed in an area the horse does not feel safe drinking (e.g. at the back of a pasture or stall)
stress/anxiety, common when competing or travelling
excessive indigestible fibre intake may be seen when horses have access to straw or other similar mature forage like old, dry pasture as their major forage source.
How to fix it:
Increase water intake and reduce indigestible fibre intake.
Ways to do this are:
use water warmers
keep water so clean that you would drink it yourself
take familiar water or a familiar flavour with you when traveling
add more salt to your horses feed (use FeedXL to work out a sensible amount)
place water in a place your horse feels safe
keep your horse with a buddy who drinks well to reduce stress/anxiety
feed limited amounts of straw or similar forage (limiting to 1% of bodyweight where hard manure is an issue). Use more digestible forage to provide the remainder of your horses required forage intake.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
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”.
We are really only just beginning to understand how important your horse’s digestive health is to his overall health and wellbeing. But we know that it is so important! So, if there is one area of equine nutrition you should devote your time to in order to improve your horse’s overall health, it is this one!
The following article gives you an introduction to equine gut health. It looks at the structure and function of the gut and the digestive process, how the way we feed horses impacts on the equine digestive system and it’s microbial population, and briefly covers some of the diseases and disorders that can occur when we feed in a way that doesn’t support digestive health.
Understanding How Horses Digest Food
Your horse’s digestive system is comprised primarily of the stomach and small intestine, cecum and colon. For a detailed description of the horse’s gastrointestinal tract, please see https://feedxl.com/31-the-gastrointestinal-tract/
The digestive tract’s most important function is breaking down food. The equine digestive process occurs in every section of the horse’s gut. The digestive process is simply “big things being broken into small things”. Once nutrients are broken down into small enough parts, they can be absorbed into the bloodstream.
The digestion and absorption occurs the entire length of the animal’s digestive system. But the way it happens in each section is different.
The Stomach
The stomach’s primary role is to hold food and then pass it slowly to the small intestine where it will be at least partially digested. The start of the digestive process does, however, occur in the stomach.
In the stomach, the horse uses hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to begin the protein digestion process. Stomach acid is required to activate the digestive enzymes. There is also a resident population of bacteria here and some microbial fermentation does take place. As far as we know, the stomach does not absorb nutrients.
The Small Intestine
The small intestine digests and absorbs fats, protein, sugars, and starch. Digestive enzymes (which are like small scissors whose job is to cut up food) as well as bile from the liver cut these nutrients into small pieces so that they can be absorbed into the bloodstream.
The rate of passage through the small intestine is quite fast. It speeds up if you feed your horse large meals, as the stomach then loses its ability to slowly release food to the small intestine. When rate of passage is too fast, nutrient absorption is reduced as the small intestine doesn’t have time to do its work.
The Hindgut
The cecum and colon (made up of the dorsal colon and ventral colon) are collectively known as the hindgut. The hindgut is the centre for structural carbohydrate digestion. Structural carbohydrates, also known commonly as fibre, are digested in a process of microbial digestion. The hindgut is, in essence, a large fermentation vat. Your horse’s resident population of “good” fibre fermenting bacteria ferment the fibre from your horse’s feed to produce volatile fatty acids (VFAs). Your horse then absorbs these VFAs and uses them as a source of energy (calories).
The good bacteria in your horse’s cecum and colon play many roles in maintaining equine health. Plus the hindgut is also responsible for water and electrolyte absorption, which needs to be working properly to allow your horse to form normal fecal balls. For more detailed information on feeding for hindgut health please see https://feedxl.com/15-keeping-the-hindgut-healthy/
How is this related to equine health?
Well, in EVERY way! If you mess up your horse’s digestion, you really mess up your horse’s health. Colic in horses is the number one killer of horses worldwide. More than 90% of horses in some disciplines have gastric ulcers. Our studies found that almost 30% of horses in race training had hindgut acidosis, which is a severe imbalance of the bacteria in the cecum and colon.
As riders we also all struggle at some level with our horse’s behaviour. Science is starting to show us how shifts in gut microbial populations is tightly linked to behaviour.
All of these conditions affect the health and wellbeing of your horse plus they will cause problems like loss of appetite, weight loss, and poor hoof quality.
It is so important that we understand that the way we feed horses has a huge impact on the risk of these diseases and disorders. The most effective way of reducing the risk is by understanding the horse digestive process, and by feeding in a way that supports digestive health, rather than destroying it.
How does what and how we feed affect gut health?
When we feed our horses we need to take into account what the horse’s nutrient requirements are so that the feeds provided actually give your horse what he needs (and this is what FeedXL is designed to help you with!).
BUT, equally important is to consider how what you choose to feed will affect your horse’s digestive process, microbial population, and overall gut health.
Here are some of the ways what and how you feed can affect your horse’s digestive health:
Long periods of time without feed – if you are feeding your horse in meals, and there are long periods (more than four hours) where he goes without something to eat, his stomach will empty and strong hydrochloric acid will start to accumulate. With an empty, highly acidic stomach, your horse is at increased risk of gastric ulcers (see https://feedxl.com/8-avoiding-gastric-ulcers/).
Too much starch – starch is the main component of cereal grains. Research has shown that if you feed too much starch per meal or per day, the risk of gastric ulcers is increased (see https://feedxl.com/starch-ulcers-whats-the-deal/).
Indigestible starch – if you feed cereal grains that have not been cooked prior to feeding, the starch is very difficult for a horse to digest in the small intestine. This means a majority of the starch from these ingredients will end up in the hindgut and can cause hindgut acidosis (see https://feedxl.com/18-feed-cooked-grains/).
Not enough fibre – If you are not feeding your horse enough fibre, the good, fibre fermenting bacteria in the hindgut won’t have enough food to maintain a healthy microbial population. With fewer fibre fermenting bacteria, your horse can suffer from vitamin deficiency, loss of appetite, weight loss, diarrhea, poor hoof quality (increasing his need for specialized hoof care) and changes in behaviour. Low fibre diets are also a major cause of colic in horses. Low fibre intake also reduces saliva production which can increase the risk of gastric ulcers (see https://feedxl.com/38-the-importance-of-fibre/).
Top Five Tips for Feeding to Promote Digestive Health
Feeding in a way that properly supports the equine digestive process is not difficult. Here are the top five things you can do to keep your horse’s gut as healthy as possible:
Tip 1 – Feed Lots of Long Stem Fibre!
Long stem fibre, in the form of forages like pasture, hay, or haylage will encourage a lot of chewing and salivation, which will support the health of your horse’s stomach (reducing the risk of gastric ulcers). As long stem forages take longer for your horse to eat, they maximize the amount of time your horse will spend eating. This again reduces the risk of gastric ulcers.
The fibre will also feed the microbial populations of good bacteria in the hindgut to keep them healthy, and it will keep the hindgut full, reducing the risk of colic in horses.
Tip 2 – Feed in Small Meals
The rate of passage through a horse’s digestive tract is naturally quite fast. BUT, horses are trickle feeders. So they eat small amounts of feed, consistently over a 24-hour period. This means even though feed is moving relatively quickly, there are only small amounts of it passing through the small intestine at any one time to give it the best chance of digestion and absorption.
However, when we feed horses in large meals, twice per day, we suddenly create a situation where large amounts of feed are moving quickly through the small intestine. When this happens, less is digested and absorbed. So your horse becomes inefficient and needs to be fed larger amounts of feed to maintain weight. AND with components of the feed like starch ending up in the hindgut, gut health and microbial populations are also compromised.
The solution here is to feed in many small meals throughout a day. As a rule of thumb, horses should have constant access to forage. Any “hard feed”, particularly high starch feeds (>15% starch), should be fed at no more than 200 grams per 100 kg BW (0.2 lb per 100 lb bodyweight) per meal. Your horse’s feed label may specify starch content. If you are unsure you should contact the manufacturer.
Tip 3 – Minimise Starch
Feeding too much starch puts your horse at increased risk of gastric ulcers and hindgut acidosis. Plus high starch diets tend to be lower in fiber and may compromise the health and balance of bacteria in the hindgut.
My rule is if you can achieve calorie intake with fibre alone (i.e. hay, haylage, chaff, pasture and high energy fibres like beet pulp) you should do so. Grains should only be used where the horse can’t physically eat enough fibre to meet calorie requirements (as is sometimes the case if your horse is a broodmare or performance horse). Or where the horse has a large requirement for muscle glycogen to compete (which often only applies to racing thoroughbreds).
But remember, forage only will NOT be a complete diet. Always use FeedXL to check which nutrients (vitamins and minerals) are missing and top these up with a supplement or balancer pellet.
Tip 4 – Feed Cooked Starch
If you are going to feed starch from cereal grains like wheat, barley, corn (maize), and rice or any by-product ingredients like rice bran and wheat midds (bran/pollard) that come from these grains, you should make sure the grains are well cooked prior to feeding. Grains and grain-based feeds that are extruded, micronized, steam flaked, or boiled will contain starch that can actually be digested in your horse’s small intestine.
Feeding cooked grains will maintain your horse’s digestive health by keeping starch out of the hindgut, preventing hindgut acidosis, and supporting the good fibre fermenting microbial population.
Tip 5 – Watch Water Intake
Water is an essential component of the equine digestive process. When your horse doesn’t drink enough, the contents of your horse’s gut can become too high in dry matter and they’re at risk of deveoping impaction colic.
Dirty, foul tasting water, cold water, hot water, water in a place where the horse doesn’t feel safe (e.g. the back of a stable) or unfamiliar water can all discourage your horse from drinking enough water.
To ensure your horse is drinking enough, keep the water clean (if you wouldn’t drink it yourself then it’s not clean enough), keep the temperature moderate where possible and be prepared when you are traveling to keep familiar sources of water with you or have a familiar way of flavouring the water to keep your horse drinking when he is not at home. If you are concerned your horse is not drinking enough water, add some salt to his feed and this will increase water intake.
Healthy Gut, Healthy Horse
When feeding your horse, you must always consider the impact of what you are feeding and your feeding management on the digestive process. Such a huge part of equine health is determined by the health of the gut!
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
Stress – did you know how it affects your horse’s gut health, and that it can do so in pretty dramatic ways?
Professor John Pluske presented a talk at an animal nutrition conference looking at the effect of stress on weanling pigs and, believe it or not, we can learn a lot about the effects of stress on a horse’s gut from this. Check out a sneak peek of his slides below.
Pigs have a very similar gastrointestinal tract to horses, so vets can look at pig data when trying to solve problems where there is not enough horse-specific information to base their research on.
Professor Pluske showed that stress negatively affects a weanling pig’s gut by damaging its ability to repair itself as well as its effectiveness as a barrier between the gut and the body. Essentially, when a piglet is stressed the gut gets damaged, and starts to leak as it can’t fix itself.
How is this relevant to horses? With the similarities in gut physiology, it seems only logical that we see similar effects of stress on gut health in horses. This means that we need to be really aware of how we feed and how that impacts gut health, especially during times of stress.
Three things that are really important:
Feeding a fully balanced diet that meets all nutrient requirements so the gut has the nutrients it needs to remain intact
Feeding lots of forage – Forage is high in fibre and supports the population of good bacteria in your horse’s gut. These bacteria are very involved in maintaining overall gut health.
Feeding high quality protein – The gut has huge requirements for specific essential amino acids. These amino acids are used by the gut to repair itself and to produce protective mucus. TO provide optimum levels of these amino acids, you need to feed ingredients with high quality protein. Protein quality is so important for many reasons. To learn more, read our post our post ‘Understanding Protein Quality’.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
Anaerobic fungi live in our horses’ hindguts and they are responsible for an estimated 30-40% of the fibre fermentation that occurs there. As well as thinking about how diet might affect our horse’s hindgut bacterial populations, we also need to think about how it might affect their anaerobic fungal populations.
The problem is that we know so little about them that we don’t know what is good and not so good for the anaerobic fungi in our horses. Information on what we know so far was presented at EEHNC by Dr. Joan Edwards. Dr. Edwards described the fungi as having potent fibre-degrading enzymes, giving them an important role in a horse’s digestion process.
These anaerobic fungi can survive outside of the horse’s gut, too, and are seemingly resistant to both oxygen (which kills many anaerobic bacteria that live in the hindgut) and desiccation (drying out).
One theory is that by looking after the bacteria in a horse’s hindgut, you will also look after the fungi. So keep your horse’s diet high in low fructan forage, keep grain and starch out of the hindgut by feeding only well-cooked grains where necessary and in as small meals as possible, and by making changes to the diet slowly.
Interested in learning more about the ongoing research in the exciting area of anaerobic fungi in horses? Read more below.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
Extreme weather can increase the trend for people to add large amounts of salt to their horse’s daily feeds, despite actual requirements or what may be coming from the rest of their diet. While horses need sodium or chloride to continue to sweat, it’s important to remember that commonplace blanket recommendations like “add 10g of salt per 100kg of bodyweight” don’t take into account a horse’s specific condition.
Take this horse’s diet for example, shown in the graph below. If we add 10g/100kg of bodyweight to his diet, his sodium intake is well over 200% of what he needs. In extreme heat conditions, this may well be accurate, but once it cools off, this is way more sodium than he needs.
What does excessive salt do to the bacteria in their gut? Salt is, after all, one of the best-known and most widely used anti-bacterial agents in the world.
A paper published in ‘Nature’ (one of the most reputable journals in the world) showed that in both humans and mice, adding more salt than normal to a diet affected the gut bacterial populations – in some cases even entirely wiping out certain strains of bacteria. The researchers were then able to link those shifts in gut bacteria to high blood pressure, which may help to explain the link between high salt diets and hypertension.
For horses, feeding excessive salt is unlikely to have any benefit and may be negatively affecting the good bacteria in your horse’s gut. When using FeedXL, be sure to meet but not exceed your horse’s requirement for sodium with salt that is added to the diet. Then leave free choice salt out so that they can top up any extra requirements they may have.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
From experienced horsemen to attendees at educational seminars, many equine enthusiasts don’t actually know how a horse’s gut works and why forage is so important for horse health.
Did you know that the equine stomach never stops secreting gastric acid? So even when your horse is not eating, it is filling the lower part of its stomach up with acidic gastric juices. While the stomach is full, this isn’t an issue as the dense mat of fibre in the gut will stop the acid from splashing around and burning the unprotected lining of the upper section of the stomach.
Problems start when horses are off feed for long periods of time and end up with a pool of acid and an empty stomach. Combine that with the movement of being ridden and you get acid splashing up and quite literally burning holes, causing ulcers, in the top part of the stomach.
What can you do to help prevent this?
Don’t exercise horses on an empty stomach – Provide a small meal of alfalfa (lucerne) hay before and after exercise.
Provide regular small meals and constant access to hay, especially during times of stress such as trailering
Provide turnout and grazing time as often as possible
Help us to educate people on how a horse’s stomach works so they can understand why forage and horse health go hand-in-hand, plus some very simple things they can do to keep their horse’s stomach healthy. Share this article on Avoiding Gastric Ulcers with them and have them understand that a horse’s stomach should never be empty and that as much as is practical you should never work a horse on an empty stomach.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
The pros and cons of proton pump inhibitors in horses
Proton pump inhibitors (like omeprazole) are a common and effective way to manage gastric ulcers in horses. However, have you ever thought about the potential side effects of long-term use on your horse’s gut bacteria?
Omeprazole in humans – is there a correlation?
This is an interesting read on the impact of proton pump inhibitors (PPI) like Omeprazole (the major drug we use to treat equine gastric ulcer syndrome) on the gut bacteria in humans: https://gut.bmj.com/content/65/5/740.
The research on horses
While these drugs are a huge help in setting up an environment in the equine stomach where ulcers can heal, they are overused in many horses (some racehorses are never taken off these drugs) to prevent ulcers in place of management systems that will reduce a horse’s risk of ulcers (like feeding a forage meal to fill the stomach prior to work).
What are PPIs doing to the equine gut bacterial populations? One study (https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/eve.07_12792) shows no impact on equine fecal bacterial populations, but use of omeprazole in these horses was only short term and the study doesn’t specify the dose used. The fecal microbiota also aren’t necessarily reflective of what is happening further up the gastrointestinal tract.
Something to keep in mind if you have a horse on a PPI medication long-term. More research is needed.
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
There has been discussion about hindgut ulcers in recent years; do they exist, what impact are they likely to have on a horse, how should we treat them, how do we even know if they are there… lots of questions, not a lot of answers.
At a workshop on the topic of sub-acute rumen acidosis (SARA), part of that discussion was around the health of the rumen wall and the impact that SARA has on it. The rumen has the same function in ruminants as the hindgut in horses, namely to digest fiber by microbes.
Essentially if you make the rumen acidic (in the same way we can make a horse’s hind gut acidic when we feed raw grains like corn/maize), you start to damage the gut wall. Initially this will reduce the gut lining’s ability to absorb nutrients (which is a huge problem in itself). BUT, make it bad enough and ulcers will appear!
The photos here (from https://vet.uga.edu/…/digest…/week02/forestomach/rumen06.htm) show rumens that have been affected by acidosis. The first (black) shows ulcers in the lining. The second shows a healed ulcer and the long term damage done.
So, when you feed, think about howwhat you are feeding is going to affect your horse’s hindgut health. It is possibly the single most important thing to consider when feeding!
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
