Whinny, Author at Springhill Equine Veterinary Clinic

Rapid weather changes play havoc with our horses GI tract.

Mar 19, 2014 | Ailments, Feed, Leg issues, Pests

They were making a fuss around here recently about a groundhog and a shadow and warmer weather. I don’t know what the big deal was I see my shadow all the time and it has nothing to do with the weather. This did, however, lead to a conversation about Spring and horses. Turns out horses face some pretty unique challenges during the warm up from our frigid winter. I realize some of my readers from the north are chuckling about the weather but this cat thought it was plenty chilly.

New green grass. New grass is very high in sugar. This sugar can quickly bring on an attack of laminitis in horses who are overweight or have Cushings. These horses are prone to a syndrome called Equine Metabolic Syndrome which causes them to have diabetes type responses to sugar. There are some treatments available but diet control and exercise are the most important.

Parasites. Parasites love Spring and Fall, feel pretty good about Winter, and hate Summer. The best parasite control methods use fecal egg counts to figure out which horses carry the most worms. Now is the best time to do fecal egg counts. Use this handy chart to determine how long you need to wait after you deworm to bring us poop:

Product Given	Wait this long to bring us a sample
Moxidectin	16 weeks
Ivermectin	12 weeks
Pyrantel, Oxibendazole, Fenbendazole	9 weeks

Weather changes. Rapid weather changes play havoc with our horses GI tract. The best advice our Doctors have is water, water, water! Adding water to your horse’s grain on a regular basis helps combat those cold weather colics. A small handful of salt when temperatures suddenly drop will encourage your horse to drink.

Encephalitis. Yep encephalitis. Spring is prime time for Eastern Encephalitis. Our mosquitoes are wicked any time of year but during the Spring they are likely to be carrying this deadly disease(99% of horses who begin to show symptoms later die of the disease). The vaccine for Eastern Encephalitis is extremely effective but only lasts for a short time. We recommend giving the vaccine every 4-6 months depending on the age and lifestyle of your horse.

Skin funk. Florida is famous worldwide for its horse skin funk. Well maybe not to regular people but definitely for horse people. Keeping your horses as dry as possible is the key! Since we all know this is next to impossible this time of year, there are several treatment options for funky Florida skin. Desitin or diaper rash cream is great for lower limbs, the zinc oxide helps heal the compromised skin while simultaneously sealing water out. Dilute Listerine or dilute vinegar may help with the thorax/ back funk but will not address a serious problem. For more severe cases (all of those sensitive skinned chestnuts out there) Springhill carries a medicated CK product that comes in a shampoo, salve, rinse and spray depending on where the problem is. Silly horses I don’t understand why they can’t just clean themselves…that’s what your tongue is for!

May your litter box be clean, and your food bowl be full!

-Tony

Senior Feeding

Mar 7, 2014 | Ailments, Feed

Dr. Bourke has been complaining recently about how much she has to feed her senior horses. I don’t understand what the big deal is, since I eat whenever I feel like it. Don’t horses do the same? I listened to her tell a story of this really nice family that had been effectively starving their older gelding because they didn’t know how to appropriately feed him. It turns out that older horses often need different kinds of feed than young or middle age horses, and LOTS of it!

All of the major feed companies make feeds specifically formulated for Senior horses. Nutrena Senior, Purina Equine Senior, Triple Crown Senior, and Seminal Senior are all examples. These senior feeds usually share the follow characteristics: They are 1) easy to chew, 2) easy to soak, 3) easy to digest, and 4) formulated as ‘complete feeds’. Complete feeds are products that can be fed as a horses’ sole source of food, replacing all other grain and hay. The major ingredient in complete feeds is usually processed alfalfa or another fiber source like beat pulp, so unlike traditional ‘grain’, you need to feed much larger quantities of it to provide the same amount of calories.

Dr. Bourke said that SKINNY senior horses, especially ones with dysfunctional teeth, need to eat between 1.5% and 2% of their body weight in senior feed per day. I did the math, and for an average sized quarter horse, this comes to 15-20 lbs of food per day!! But who feeds by weight anyway? Everybody I know uses scoops – some big scoops, some small scoops, some heaping scoops, but scoops nonetheless. Dr. Bourke said it’s really important to know how much 1 ‘scoop’ of your feed weighs. I brought her my food scoop, which turns out is only ½ a cup, and she weighed it for me. The amount was miniscule. I think I will complain to management. But back to horse feed. The ‘standard’ horse sized food scoop can hold 3 quarts, which is APPROXIMATELY 3 lbs of food. But again, this varies. If you have a kitchen scale, use this to weigh out one full scoop. If you don’t have a kitchen scale, put one scoops worth of food in a large plastic bag, and take it to your local feed store for them to weigh for you. The produce scale at the grocery store works great too!

If you need an approximate place to start, 15-20 lbs of food, assuming a 3 lb scoop, is 5-6 full scoops per horse per day. Think 2 full scoops in the AM, 2 scoops midday, and 2 scoops at night. Yes, that’s a LOT of food! Another way to think about this, is that if you are really feeding 20 lbs of food per day, you are going to use up an entire 50 lb bag of feed in 2 and a half days. It is important to remember that while it is safe and often necessary to feed this much senior feed, it would be VERY dangerous to give any horse this much of other kinds of feeds. These guidelines apply to complete senior feeds only. And as always, make feeding changes slowly.

I asked Dr. Bourke about hay, and she said that teeth-less old horses can’t chew well enough to get much nutrition out of hay. She said they can even colic or choke if given really stemmy stuff like coastal hay. She said that when feeding enough senior feed, hay isn’t required at all, but that if you want to give the horse ½ a flake or so of either alfalfa or peanut hay in order to give them something to munch on, that’s ok.