Horse Diarrhea - Nutritional Mismanagement Likely Cause of Most Horse Maladies

Horse Diarrhea & Equine Veterinary Clinic Newsletter
Volume 1 • Issue 1 EVC • 9906 N. 132nd Street, Omaha, NE 68142 Spring 2004

HORSE DIARRHEA - NUTRITIONAL MISMANAGEMENT LIKELY CAUSE OF MOST HORSE MALADIES

We believe the cause of most horse diarrhea and maladies is based on nutritional mismanagement and refusal to accept the fact that nutrition is physiology. This problem goes way beyond simply how much protein or energy is fed each day.

Horse Diarrhea Preventative Medicine and Nutritional Management
This practice has had a long interest in the concept of preventative medicine. We view nutritional management as one of the cornerstones for implementing such a program.

A Hunch Becomes A Reality
Intervention that helps approximate normal intestinal function should have two positive effects:

It should maximize the efficient utilization of the diet fed.
It should help prevent the diet from becoming a source of potentially serious, life-threatening, physiologic problems. At first, this concept was only our working hypothesis — basically a hunch. But over the last two years, we had the opportunity to participate in 17 field clinical studies with a product called ReSTORE™. And our hunch proved right.

ReSTORE™ was developed to enhance the natural digestive processes of the horse. It has positively demonstrated the importance of intestinal management in growth, and body condition maintenance. Most interesting to us, it appears to positively impact those problems we associate with management-imposed nutritional stress, such as colic and chronic diarrhea.

Intestinal Management is Critical to Your Horse
Some say the design and creation of the camel was a celestial committee decision. If so, the horse was planned and developed by the same committee with leftover parts of the camel.

This design left the horse in a precarious ecological position. Compared to other plant-eating animals, such as the cow, sheep (or even the camel), horses appear to have been put together backward.

The digestive tract of most successful plant-eating animals includes a modification of the stomach. This modification allows for some pre-digestion of plant material by special bacteria that reside here.

Without these bacteria, the animal would starve. No mammal possesses the enzymes necessary to digest the structural part of plants or their seeds. Horses, most likely because their primary defense is to run from danger, were not provided with a modified stomach, which would add considerable weight and bulk… weight and bulk that must be carried when attempting a fast getaway.

Instead, horses put the specialized digestive organ, vital to living on plants, at the end of the line where essential populations of bacteria live in the large intestines and two blind sacs next to it called ceaca. The rest of the digestive tract is not much different from your own.

How Horses Cope with the Digestive Tract’s Arrangement
The arrangement of the digestive tract creates problems. To deal with it, horses are forced to spend all of their time eating, and eating relatively small meals. Small meals allow more time for chewing, which increases feed particle breakdown. This gives the natural stomach acids and enzymes produced in the small intestines and pancreas time to attack and absorb some of the nutrients present. Small meals also accommodate the restricted size and efficiency of the all-essential large bowel bacterial attack on the structural part of the plant which makes up the majority of the carbohydrate source available to the horse.

The take-home message: Horses developed over millions of years as animals which do best eating small meals and eating often. What was true a million years ago is still true today.