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Articles: What is Natural Hoof Trimming? How To Feed The Feet Right Off Of Your Horse Tools You Will Need to Perform a Maintenance Trim Looking for Custom Made Farrier Chaps?
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How to Keep a Healthy Horse
There are really 4 basic requirements to keeping your horse happy and healthy. Food None of these alone will keep your horse healthy. It is a combination of everything you do that keeps stress down and provides your horse with the nutrition and excercise necessary to keep them in optimal health. Let's take a brief look at each of the categories. Food Our horsekeeping philosophy is to keep it as natural and simple as possible. Providing the horse with simple basic food is really all that the average horse needs. What is simple basic horse food? Essentially...good quality dry grass hay. That's right... not alfalfa, not clover, not grains, not highly processed food products, not pellets, not sweet feed, not chemicals, not drugs....dry grass hay.... Unless your horse is an athelete, grass hay should be all the nutrition they need along with salt and a mineral block. Basic ingredients in a good grass hay may contain:
The MAJOR cause of obesity, laminitis and founder is food...specifically green grass from pasture and legumes such as alfalfa, clover, soy, or birdsfoot trefoil. Sweet feeds, rich grains, pelleted feeds and prescription drugs (such as some yearly innoculations, antibiotics, and steroids) can also be founder triggers with some horses, especially if they have already foundered. Additionally, being overweight, or obese is a strong indicator for likelihood of founder. There are also known genetic tendencies for some horses and breeds...specifically Arabs, Morgans and ponies. These breeds or crosses of these breeds appear to be particularly sensitive to grass founder and laminitis.
Quality grass hay should be relatively dust free and should not be moldy. The outside of a bale may be brown, but the inside should be green and smell rich. Grass hay should be cut after morning dew has evaporated to prevent excessive fructose content. Find more information about grass hay at www.safergrass.org. Horses also need access to a mineral block and a salt block to provide elements that are not in found in high concentration in their feed. Water Obviously, fresh water is essential to the horse. They are likely to drink 10 to 12 gallons per day and water should be available at all times. Ideally your horses will have a pond or large pool that they can walk into to soak their feet, drink, and play in. It shouldn't be swimming pool clean...and as a matter of fact, wild horses have been seen drinking muddy water, suggesting that they may be picking up healthy gut bacteria, as well as minerals that may be suspended in the water. Foot soaking can also relieve some of the pain and inflammation of laminitis/founder as well as cleaning and softening the hoof, especially during extended dry periods. Exercise The wild horse, which we use as our model for horse health, moves between 15 and 30 miles per day in search of food and water. The average domestic horse is lucky if it walks a couple of miles per day and gets ridden several miles once per week. Research is suggesting that movement and excercise can offset, or even prevent laminitis/founder in some cases. Therefore it is a horse owners responsibility to find a way to encourage their horses to move as much as possible during the day. A simple method of encouraging movement is to spread their daily hay out to several locations within the paddock or field, preferably as large a dry paddock as you can arrange. This will encourage natural foraging instincts that will keep your horses moving from feeding station to feeding station throughout the day. The best part is that they will be excercising and it will be their idea! Obviously, taking some time to lunge them, or provide some other excercise for 15 to 30 minutes 2 or 3 times per week would be an additional practice that would help keep their muscles toned, reduce excess weight, and help maintain flexibility. Environment
Horses
are very adaptive creatures. Extremes of heat and cold don't appear
to bother them too much, as long as they've had time to gradually adjust
to cllimatic conditions. Overwhelmingly, the major traditional causes of lameness are joint disease, laminitis, infections, and injury. Let's look at each of these briefly. Joint disease can be caused by many factors and can be very difficult to diagnose. I look at humans for a model and find striking similarities between joint diseases in man and horse. While apparently some problems can be caused by weak genetics, usually this results in a weakness or tendency toward problems rather than an outright cause. More often than not we see diet and lack of excercise as the major culprits. Being overweight or obese can also put an enormous strain on the joints, in addition to the fact that some foods can cause joint inflammation in people and animals that are sensitive to certain substances. Rather than throwing bottles of prescription medication at the animal in the hopes that 'something' will work, or nailing restrictive shoes on their feet, we should be looking at the foundations of horse care and eliminate the possible environmental factors first. It takes a bit longer to correct a problem this way, but it is a real solution instead of a bandaid. A horseshoe in this case is nothing more than a bandaid. Laminitis is rampant in our area. We have been to several operations this year and found well over half of the horses suffering active laminitis attacks! The common thread in all of these cases is green pasture...that's right...turning your horse onto green pasture is a recipe for laminitis and founder. It is the equivalent of putting a human on a chocolate ice cream diet 24/7, it is simply too rich for a horses digestive system. Not only does grass promote laminitis and founder, but it is also a major contributor to your horse becoming overweight. The worst times of the year for laminitis attacks are early spring and late fall when the temperatures are cool at night and warm during the day, but any growing green grass is capable of triggering laminitis. Cool weather produces an excess of fructose in the grass that upsets the horses digestive system setting up the conditions for laminitis...founder occurs when laminitis becomes acute. The traditional vet/farrier solution starts by administering blood thinners to increase circulation in the hoof, pain killers to medicate symptoms and special shoes on the feet to attempt to slow down or cushion the sole and provide support as the coffin bone sinks toward the ground in the hoof capsule. Once again...we are treating the symptoms and not the cause. Until and unless we address the source of the laminitis the problem will simply be masked by shoeing, while allowing the condition of the hoof to continue deteriorating to the point where the only humane option may become euthanasia. Most of these horses could be restored to soundness within a couple of months with proper diet, environment and natural hoof care, and some can be fully returned to health within a year. Infections have so many causes that it is folly to try cover them here. But the results of infections can be both very painful and difficult to heal. Veterinary care is likely to focus on drug therapy or invasive procedures up to and including resection of the hoof wall. In general, a farrier is likely to just put some "special shoe" on and douse the hoof with a noxious chemical under a pad to try to ward off the spread of the infection, or at least keep the hoof in one piece until the infection blows out of the coronary band. The reality is that in many cases the shoe, or actually the nails running through the hoof, are open pathways for infection. Have you ever seen a farrier sterilize a shoe nail? The inside of the hoof capsule is full of capillaries and is actually a blood pump. After driving a half-dozen nails through the growing area of a hoof, the likelihood of infection increases dramatically. Also, many shoes are not reset in a timely fashion, typically 6-8 weeks. Allowing shoes to remain on past this time period puts unusual stresses on the hoof as it continues to grow and I have seen loosened nails allow decaying matter to get packed up into nail holes, once again providing easy access for infectious organisms. A pasture grass and protein rich diet also compromise a horses immune system and redirect blood flow from the feet to the gut in an attempt to compensate for inflammation in the digestive tract. This reduces the blood flow through the hoof and allows bacteria that would otherwise be dealt with quickly in a healthy hoof, to grow out of control and blossom into infection. The solution...better diet and no shoes! Injuries simply can't be helped sometimes. The best thing you can do for a hoof injury is contact your vet. If there is something we can do to help facilitate healing we can work with you and your vet on a treatment plan. There are various types of hoof boots available for applying medications or soaks, as well as regular hoof boots that can be used instead of shoeing to protect the injured hoof and provide support to the hoof capsule if necessary. Boots are far less invasive than horseshoes and don't require driving nails through injured hoof tissue. For
more information on holistic horse care, see our Resources
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