How Stress Affects Your Horse’s Gut

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:

1. Feeding a fully balanced diet that meets all nutrient requirements so the gut has the nutrients it needs to remain intact
2. 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.
3. 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’.

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