How to Interpret Your Hay Test This article is posted with the kind permission of Shelagh Niblock and Horse Community Journals Inc. Updated: June 15, 2022 By Shelagh Niblock, BSc. Ag., PAS Buying hay for your horse can be a challenge whether you buy it a few bales at a time or purchase a year’s supply when …
Article courtesy of KER For most horsemen, spring is a welcome season. Among other reasons, spring brings the green up of pastures. While grass seems the most natural of feedstuffs for horses and ponies, it can stir up health concerns in susceptible individuals. When it comes to consumption of spring pasture, horses and ponies hardly …
Weight Gain! Let’s do some math. It happens each year. We take the blanket off our horse and find that somewhere around 40-60 pounds has shrunk off the perfect weight he/she was carrying going into winter. With show or trail season coming soon we naturally want our equine partner looking the best possible. So, what …
By Shelagh Niblock, PAS Horse owners who are interested in equine nutrition, and actively involved in planning the composition of their horse’s diet, will know that iron intake has become a subject of much discussion. Terms such as “iron overload” are easy to find using a Google search, and the risks associated with “free radicals” …
Methods of curing and storing hay greatly influence its appropriateness for horses. The key to properly cured hay lies predominantly in moisture content. For best results, hay should not be baled until there is less than 20% moisture. Hay baled too wet might mold, heat, and pose a fire risk. Conversely, hay baled too dry …
When a horse owner is faced with an unexpected soft-tissue injury, a flurry of questions immediately springs to mind. When do I call the vet? Does the wound really need stitches? What about an antibiotic? Here are some helpful facts to help your horse on his road to recovery: Any time your horse is injured, …
Exercise requires an integration of many systems, each containing varied elements, and any factor that upsets this integration could cause fatigue. Horse owners often have trouble identifying fatigue because its multidimensional nature varies with activity, training and physiological status of the individual, and environmental conditions. The onset of fatigue is most often associated with either …
Horses require vitamin E in their diets for many biological functions. One of vitamin E’s most well-known roles is as a powerful antioxidant that promotes health of muscle and nerve cells. Because it is fat-soluble, vitamin E must be consumed with dietary fat in order to be properly absorbed in the body. Sources of vitamin …
Vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) supplementation helps prevent various disorders affecting both the nervous and musculoskeletal systems, including neuroaxonal dystrophy/equine degenerative myeloencephalopathy, equine motor neuron disease, vitamin E deficient myopathy, and nutritional myodegeneration. These conditions can be prevented largely by providing adequate dietary vitamin E to horses, and recent research shows* that a liquid vitamin E supplement …
Has your horse decided that gobbling his grain is no longer as fun as it once was? Has he slowed his eating so much that he requires hours to finish a meal he once would devour in mere minutes? Horses lose their appetite for a variety of reasons. One lesser-known cause is gastrointestinal discomfort emanating …
