Grazing Horse
Joy of Spring?

Some of you may be thinking we’re running a little behind this year, and you would be right. Half the winter and the beginning of spring have been taken up with a slightly alarming state of affairs which came to a head just a fortnight ago. As some of you already will have heard, in January I was diagnosed with a heart murmur and a significant aneurysm of the ascending aorta. The prognosis was not good if not operated upon within two months. So, the wheels were put into motion and on the 28th March, I underwent 6 hours of open heart surgery at Rangueil Hospital in Toulouse.

Without going into great detail, I am well on the road to recovery and in another two to three weeks should be picking up the old routine again…

 

Spring is a worrying time for some owners and the age old subject crops up every year - laminitis and the other variously associated problems such as Equine Metabolic Syndrome (EMS) and PPID.

I have written about laminitis in the past and the advice given has not changed. One of the major problems causing laminitis does not lie with the horse itself but rather with the environment in which it has grown up and/or lives. This is just as valid for laminitis developing from PPID (Pituitary Pars Intermedia Dysfunction - formerly known as Cushing’s Disease). When we consider all the horses that have crossed our path that have been laminitic (and I refuse to be so dramatic as some well know “presences” on the internet - it is not every horse that has been laminitic and it is not truly laminitis if an occasional ring appears on the hoof) or have PPID, there are just two common denominators: raiding the grain store for next door’s chickens or similar, and bad management - encompassing how the horses are kept on a daily basis and how they are fed.  Of all the horses that have grown up and lived at EquiLIBRE® in the French Pyrenees, not one single horse has ever shown any true signs of laminitis and PPID is completely unknown. And we are talking of over 150 horses so we should expect to see at least one or two examples even if the incidence was but 5%. Those that postulate that the age of the horses is not sufficiently high enough to raise the chance of incidence must be reminded that “the older laminitic horse” is very frequently describing an animal of just 15 - 18 years of age. The EquiLIBRE® horses include a large number between 20 and 30, with a significant enough number between 30 and 35. Even the older mares who reached the grand old ages of 42 and 43 have never shown the slightest sign of PPID nor laminitis.

But probably the most worrying aspect of this is that Böringher-Ingelheim, the only producer and supplier of pergolide (Prascend®) and active researcher in the field of PPID, has been offered access to the EquiLIBRE® herd information and has not even had the decency to reply to the repeated offers. Quite clearly the business of treating laminitic PPID horses is very profitable.

 

Read more about laminitis by clicking the link below.

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Comfort

One morning recently, the sight that greeted us was that of four horses and a donkey lying down sleeping or dozing with one horse, in this case the matriarch, standing watch (sadly not captured on 'film'). Those of you that have been reading these newsletters for some while now will be familiar with references to anthropomorphism - the attributing of human characteristics to animals. We perceive comfort as being enclosed, warmth, shutting the world out and snuggling up. Some of our animals are like that too, in their own way. Dogs and cats are great seekers of comfort, searching out warmth, making little nests…sleeping all the hours they possibly can with short interruptions for food and attention. The reason for such behaviour is that cats and dogs are opportunists; their instincts are still those of the hunter and the hours of sleep are to conserve energy when not hunting and only to hunt when it is worth, or necessary, to hunt. In this way, the animal is managing its territory.

The horse has quite the opposite role. It is not predator but prey. This has made the horse an opportunist in a completely reversed sense. The horse - like the dog and the cat - eats “when it can” which is as much of the day as is possible. But as a predator, it must also always be ready to run - to escape so rather than managing its living terrain the horse exploits it. For this, the horse has an adapted digestive system which cannot cope with large meals but is specifically for eating small amounts at frequent intervals. This avoids the “post-prandial dip” that affects both humans and other omnivores and carnivores, the energy sapping digestion of a heavy meal.

Comfort for the horse is thus a completely different concept from comfort for a human. Locked up in a stall, the horse is not at ease - there is no escape from potential predators and nobody to keep watch so the horse is less likely to sleep in its stall than out in the open. And how many times do we find, in mid-winter, that the horse has eschewed possible shelter from an open stall and found a nice patch of snow to lie in!

Shelters are most used during the daytime, in the summer…as a shelter from the flies more than anything else. The concept of shutting the horse up at night for “a good night’s sleep” is completely contrary to the nature of the animal: the horse is technically a nocturnal animal. This does not mean that the horse sleeps during the day but rather it is most active at night. Studies using GPS-tracking have shown that he covers a great deal more ground at night than during the daytime - and visual studies will usually confirm this too. As darkness falls, a herd - or even just two horses - will suddenly “wake up” and start running around the field for maybe half an hour before settling down again. If we wait, we often see them start again after a pause.

After 52 million years of adaptation - compared with the 10 million of man and the 5,500 years of domestication - the horse really is the master of his own ways. It is he that teaches us, and not the reverse…

Locomotion & Hoof Care Course – Level 1
The next Level 1 Locomotion and Hoof Care course is provisionally planned for the weekend of 2 & 3 September 2017. If you would like confirmation of the dates, please drop us a line at info@sabotslibres.eu
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Sabots Libres
31150 Fenouillet, France
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