Gut health! It’s so important but also really hard to ‘measure’. One way to get a bit of an indication of what your horse’s hindgut health is like is to check faecal pH. A healthy hindgut will stay at quite a neutral pH, close to 7. At this pH the good fibre fermenting bacteria will […]
Quite often we are contacted by owners regarding old horses with very poor or no effective grinding teeth (molars) that are losing weight. On looking at the diets for these horses we often find that their owners have done a wonderful job of selecting suitable feeds that require little chewing and/or can be soaked in […]
We are frequently asked about how to add Vitamin E to a horse’s diet when all other nutrient requirements are being met. Vitamin E is abundant in fresh green forages and many horses will meet their daily requirement of Vitamin E with adequate intake of good quality pasture. Vitamin E declines over time in stored […]
“You eat like a horse”. There is a very good reason this saying exists; Horses. Eat. A. Lot!!! And a vast majority of horse owners know this, but every now and again we come across a horse owner who is concerned about weight loss in their horse and it is simply because they don’t realise […]
When a horse eats, much of its feed is made up of LARGE carbohydrate, fat and protein molecules. The horse can only absorb tiny little molecules from its gut (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 […]
Soybean naturally contains an anti-nutritional factor called trypsin inhibitor. Trypsin inhibitor is a compound that actually blocks the action of trypsin (which is an enzyme, or as I call them, a little pair of scissors, in the horses gut that cuts up protein so it can be absorbed by the horse). When trypsin is blocked […]
Well… happily, this is one of these easiest things to assess in horse nutrition because you can actually SEE if your horse is getting enough feed! If your horse is getting enough feed he will maintain his weight. If he is not getting enough, he will lose weight. Or if he is getting too much, […]
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. Light condition and/or weight loss are both symptoms of not quite enough calories in the diet. Feeding more and increasing calorie intake should help with energy levels […]
Do you ever wonder what is best to feed in really cold weather to help your horse stay warm? Well, the answer is hay or any type of high fibre forage really. The fibre in hay and other forages is digested in your horse’s hindgut via the process of bacterial fermentation. A by-product of this […]
Cooking cereal grains before you feed them to your horse is very important. It improves how easy they are for your horse to digest and drastically reduces the chance of them causing negative effects in your horse’s hindgut. So if you are cooking your own grains, how long should you cook them for? Are you […]
