Feeding a Horse with Laminitis

Feeding a horse with a history of laminitis can be a time consuming and confusing task and one that, if not done properly, can have painful consequences for your horse.

The laminitic horse’s diet needs to be low in sugar (we could get all very technical here and call sugars non-structural carbohydrates, water soluble carbohydrates, starches, ether soluble carbohydrates or non-fibre carbohydrates, but let’s just keep it simple and say ‘sugar’). Sugars in feeds cause a horses blood insulin to rise after eating and this is what researchers now believe triggers most cases of laminitis and certainly most cases of grass or pasture laminitis.

As well as being low in sugar, the diet also needs to provide good quality protein to allow damaged hoof tissue to repair, as well as meet a horse’s requirements for vitamins and minerals.

The good news is, feeding a laminitic horse doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are some guidelines for making it a lot easier:

Base the diet on low sugar pasture or hay

All horse’s diets should be based on forage and the laminitic horse is no different. However they need low sugar forages. There are a few ways you can give your horse access to low sugar forages. These are:

• Allow your horse to graze in the very early hours of the morning until about 11 am as this is when pasture sugar levels are lowest. If you are unable to control the hours of the day your horse is allowed to graze, use a grazing muzzle to reduce your horse’s intake of pasture.

• Feed hays that are typically low in sugars. These include mature or stemmy tropical grass hays and mature or stemmy lucerne hay (including lucerne hay that has been weather damaged).

• If you can’t access these kinds of hays, soak the hay you do have available in warm water for 30 minutes, before tipping all of the water off, rinsing and feeding.

• Avoid any hays that are known to have high levels of sugar, including ryegrass hay, oaten, wheaten or barley hay.

• Lucerne haylage or silage that has been produced specifically for horses is also a low sugar forage option.

Feed according to your horses need to gain, hold or lose weight

Assess the body condition (fatness) of your horse and have a clear goal in mind as to whether you want the horse to gain, hold or lose weight.

Gain Weight

If the goal is to gain weight you should:

1. Provide your horse with access to as much low sugar pasture or hay as it wants to eat.

2. Feed a low sugar complete feed at the recommended rates for your horse’s bodyweight and current activity. Complete feeds will provide your horse with the calories, protein, vitamins and minerals it needs. OR Mix your own low sugar balanced feed by using high calorie unfortified feeds like soybean hulls or sugarbeet pulp, add your own vitamins and minerals via a low dose rate vitamin and mineral supplement and add protein from soybean, lupins or faba beans.

3. If additional weight gain is needed add some oil to the diet. Start with ¼ of a cup per day and gradually increase the amount if required.

Maintain Weight

To maintain your horses weight you should:

1. Allow the horse access to up to 2.5% of its bodyweight of low sugar forage (12.5 kg for a 500 kg horse) per day.

2. Balance the diet with a low dose rate vitamin and mineral supplement and additional protein from soybean, lupins or faba beans if your pasture or hay quality is poor.

3. Monitor your horse closely. If it is not holding its bodyweight on this diet, increase the amount of low sugar forage you are feeding and reassess your horse. If it still isn’t holding its bodyweight you can add a high calorie, low sugar unfortified feeds like soybean hulls or sugarbeet pulp to the existing diet. OR Switch to using a low sugar complete feed at the recommended rate for your horse.

Lose Weight

If your horse needs to lose weight you must do it carefully, as forcing the laminitic horse into rapid weight loss can also stop them from healing their damaged hoof tissue and may cause other problems like hyperlipaemia.  To gently encourage your horse to lose weight you should:

1. Feed up to 2% of your horses body weight (10 kg/day for a 500 kg horse) per day as low quality, low sugar forage, including mature or stemmy tropical grass hays and/or weather damaged lucerne hay.

2. Balance the diet with a low dose rate vitamin and mineral supplement and good quality protein from full fat soybean.

3. Constantly assess your horse’s body weight and adjust the diet according to the rate of weight loss. If your horse is not losing weight, reduce the amount of low sugar forage being fed to 1.5% of the horse’s current bodyweight (7.5 kg/day for a 500 kg horse). If this reduction doesn’t achieve the weight loss you want, reduce the amount of forage being fed to 1.5% of the horse’s ideal bodyweight.

To prevent boredom in these horses, make their forage hard to eat so it is more time consuming for them. One way you can do this is by placing their hay in 2 or 3 hay nets, which makes the hay hard to pull out. If you do feed hay out of hay nets you may need to dampen it down slightly to reduce dust. You should also feed their daily allocation of hay in 2 or 3 meals per day.

If the horse is able to exercise, a gentle exercise routine each day will also help them to lose weight and reduce their risk of further bouts of laminitis.

Never feed a grain or grain by-product based feed

If your horse needs extra feed in addition to the low sugar forage you are feeding you must be VERY careful when selecting a suitable feed. You should NEVER feed a feed to a laminitic horse if it has any of the following ingredients:

• Oats, corn, wheat, rice or barley

• Millrun, millmix, bran (rice or wheat), pollard

• Any form of steam flaked, micronized or extruded grain

So read all labels and lists of ingredients carefully before buying a feed and remember.It is buyer beware. Many feeds that contain grain by-products like millrun, bran or pollard advertise themselves as being ‘grain-free’. This is grossly misleading and these feeds present as much danger to your laminitic horse as a feed that contains grain. Other feeds claim to be ‘Low GI’, but again, if they contain any of the ingredients listed above, they should be avoided for laminitic horses.

If you are considering a particular feed for your laminitic horse, call the manufacturer to see if they have had the feeds sugar and starch levels tested and ask to see the results. Ideally, feeds for laminitic horses should have a sugar and starch level of less than 12%.

Make sure the diet is balanced!

It is very important to make sure the diet you are feeding your laminitic horse is balanced. Meeting the laminitic horses requirements for protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals will help them recover from any previous bouts of laminitis, help them to resist other disease and infection and will keep them in good overall health.

Pryde’s Products that can help.

EasiSport

EasiKeeper

EasiOil

LupinPak

Dr Nerida Richards
Equilize Horse Nutrition Pty Ltd

Feeding Sick or Injured Horses

Sick or injured horses, including horses suffering from burns have different requirements to normal healthy horses, both in the types of nutrients they need and the sorts of feeds they can be fed. To determine the best thing to feed sick or injured horses the following guidelines should be followed:

Don’t make any drastic changes to the diet

Sudden changes to any horse’s diet should be avoided and this is never more the case when you have a sick or injured horse on hand. If your horse was on a primarily forage diet (mainly pasture, hay or chaff) prior to the sickness or injury, you should attempt to maintain the horse on a largely forage diet. Likewise if your horse was being hard fed, you can continue to hard feed the horse, but don’t suddenly introduce hard feeds to a horse that wasn’t on them previously, and unless there is a good medical reason (for example in the case of laminitis) you should not just suddenly stop feeding hard feeds or quickly switch to a new feed.

Keeping their feed consistent will keep them happier (they are creatures of habit and don’t like sudden changes) and also make sure you avoid problems like colic that can be associated with sudden changes in feed.

It is quite likely that you are going to need to make some changes to a horse’s diet. If this is the case, do it as slowly as possible or practical.

Tip: If your horse has to go to a veterinary hospital take along the feed he or she is used to and leave clear directions on what and how much your horse is normally fed. If your horse was not hard fed before going to the clinic leave a note with the staff and if you have to, stick a note on your horses stable door requesting your horse is not fed any hard feed, as most horses in vet clinics will get some sort of hard feed unless otherwise directed.

Introduce new feeds as gradually as possible

There are going to be cases when your horse:

• No longer has access to the feed he or she was used to (as in the case of fires burning out pastures);

• Needs new feeds or supplements to make sure requirements for the healing process are met; or

• Cannot physically eat their normal diet due to injuries to the muzzle or mouth.

When a horse no longer has access to their normal feed, you should find something as similar as possible to replace it with. For example, if a horses normal grass pasture was burnt out by fire, you should initially put the horse on a diet of free choice grass hay. Don’t change them to something like lucerne hay or a hard feed based diet straight away as it is just too different from what they were used to and may cause problems like diarrhoea and colic.

When additional feeds or supplements need to be added you should do so as slowly as possible.

If the horse can’t eat its normal diet due to an injured mouth or muzzle, you should find ‘easy to eat’ versions of feeds similar to the feeds your horse was used to. So for example, if your horse was on grass pasture or grass hay, use oaten or wheaten chaff as an easy to eat alternative. If your horse was eating lucerne hay, use lucerne chaff. And if your horse is finding its hard feed difficult to chew and swallow, soak it in warm water to make it soft before feeding.

Feed enough feed, but not too much

A sick or injured horse needs to have its calorie intake carefully managed. There are two main situations you need to be aware of:

1. A horse with an injury that is confined to box rest – in these situations you need to ensure the horse does not become overweight through inactivity and overfeeding. Being overweight will put more stress on an injury, particularly if it is some sort of leg or skeletal injury. In addition, overfeeding will make the horse more agitated or hyperactive while confined and may lead to the horse injuring itself again while locked up.
   
   The best diet for these horses is free choice moderate to good quality grass hay, a low dose rate vitamin and mineral supplement, salt lick and water. Providing access to free choice hay will also help relieve boredom.
   

2. A horse with a sickness or severe injury (including burns) – in these situations the most important considerations are to get the horse to eat (as going off feed can be a major problem) and stop them from losing weight. A sick or severely injured horse that is losing weight will be not be able to start the healing process because its body is in a state of breakdown and not rebuild. If a horse doesn’t eat, it is also likely that its immune system will be compromised, again slowing the healing process and exposing your horse to the risk of secondary disease and infection.

First and foremost with these horses you must get them to eat (see below for tips on getting a horse to eat). Once they are eating, they need to be fed a diet with adequate calories and protein to allow them to maintain their bodyweight or gain bodyweight where required. Feeds such as lucerne hay, grass hay and good quality sweetfeeds or pellets/cubes may be needed for the horse to maintain weight. These horses need to be condition scored regularly and their rations adjusted according to whether they are losing, maintaining or gaining weight.

Tips for getting a horse to eat:

• Make sure you are managing pain as pain is one of the first things that will put them off their feed. Work with your vet to develop a good pain management strategy.

• Don’t put medications in your horses feed – most medications are not particularly tasty so instead of putting them in the feed wait until after your horse has eaten and give it to them via a paste made with apple sauce.

• If your horse won’t eat its normal feed you can try adding some things including:

• Bran

• Honey

• Molasses

• Applesauce

• Grated carrot or apple

• Brewers yeast; or

• Lucerne chaff

• Be careful adding salt. If you make a feed too salty your horse won’t eat it, so add it sparingly and try feeds without it at all to see if it helps with their appetite.

• Make sure the feed bin is in a comfortable position for the horse to reach. For example if it has a painful foreleg injury, elevate the feed bin slightly to reduce the amount of pressure a horse has to put on its legs to eat.

• Allow your horse to graze when possible – horses that won’t eat will generally still graze, and periods of time grazing may be enough to stimulate their appetite so they will eat what you are trying to feed them.

• Feed in frequent small meals and remove uneaten feed every 2 hours to keep it fresh and palatable.

If none of these strategies work and your horse will not eat, contact a veterinarian and discuss the options available for tube feeding.

Make sure the diet contains everything your horse needs

Never is feeding a balanced diet more important than when feeding a horse recovering from sickness or injury. Protein and certain vitamins and minerals are critically important for promoting the healing process as is ensuring the horse is receiving the correct amount of calories.

If your horse is only eating a small amount of feed each day, the diet should be balanced so that its nutrient needs are largely met within that small meal size. This may involve feeding high protein supplements, concentrated vitamin mineral supplements and using high energy oils and grains to help meet calorie requirements.

Special notes for burns victims:

Severe burns cause:

• Increased fat metabolism

• Protein breakdown in the body; and

• Increased use and excretion of vitamin C and B-vitamins

Thus a severely burnt horse’s requirements for these nutrients as well as fluid and calories can be increased up to 100% above maintenance needs.

The diet for these horses should be: 

• High in protein (14 – 16%)

• High in fat (7 – 10%); and

• Fortified with vitamins and minerals including vitamin E, C and the B-group vitamins.

Finally ...

If you are not sure where to start with feeding a sick or injured horse seek professional help. Feeding a horse the wrong thing when sick or failing to recognise that your horse has special requirements can slow the healing process, suppress your horses immune system and expose your horse to secondary disease and infections. It is important to get it right.

Footnote:

Pryde’s EasiFeed offer a complimentary diet balancing service and can provide diets for horses with many specific injuries and diseases including diets for:

• Burns victims

• Horses with leg or skeletal injuries

• Horses with Cushing’s disease, insulin resistance or laminitis; and

• Horses with kidney or liver disease.

If your horse has one of these or any other injuries and diseases contact Pryde’s with specific details of your horse and they will put together a custom balanced diet.

The following feeds from the Pryde’s EasiFeed® range may be suitable for burns victims:

Feed Name

Features

EasiBreed and BioMare Cubes

High protein complete feeds that can be wet down to a mash when needed

Protein Pak

High protein full fat soybean to increase a horse's protein intake

EasiResult

A tasty Sweetfeed that may help getting a horse to eat

Energy Pak and Power Pak

High energy extruded corn and barley with full fat soybean that can be wet down to a mash when needed

Rebuild

High protein and oil pellet with extra vitamin E and B1 that can also be wet down to a mash when needed

EasiFeed 300 Pellet

A concentrated vitamin and mineral pellet that can be used to balance rations, especially for horses with limited appetites

Dr Nerida Richards
Equilize Horse Nutrition Pty Ltd

Tying Up – Avoiding the Knots (RER)

Tying up is a painful condition for a horse and a frustrating one for trainers and owners, with affected horses constantly suffering setbacks in race preparations. Symptoms can range from severe muscle pain and distress, firm, hard muscles following exercise, apparent colic, excessive sweating, elevated heart and respiration rates, a stiff gait, muscle tremors and a reluctance to move to more mild and elusive symptoms that just involve the horse feeling stiff, lazy or slightly lame.

Whether a horse suffers with severe tying up or a mild form, it will limit their performance and well being, so the more you can do to reduce the frequency and severity of bouts of tying up for affected horses, the better their performance and health will be.

What is tying up?                    

Tying up, also called exertional rhabdomyolysis is a group of diseases that cause muscle damage and pain during and immediately following exercise. There are two main forms of tying up; polysaccharide storage myopathy (PSSM) and recurrent exertional rhabdomyolysis (RER). It is the RER form of tying up that most commonly affects racing thoroughreds.

Horses affected by RER tend to exhibit abnormal and excessive muscle contractions, likely due to a heritable defect in calcium regulation within their cells. RER is often triggered by exercise and excitement and it is well recognised that young fillies and horses with a nervous temperament are most often affected. It appears that the older a horse gets, the less prone it is to the disease.

Tying up is best diagnosed using a blood sample. Horses with tying up will exhibit significantly elevated levels of muscle proteins like creatine kinase (CK) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST). Speak with your veterinarian about these tests.

Dietary management of horses with tying up

Close dietary management of horses that tie up can help to reduce the incidence or severity of the disease in affected horses. Following are 5 tips for feeding horses that tie up:

Tip 1 – Minimise starch and sugar intake. Diets high in starch and sugars (mainly those that contain large amounts of grain) are well known to make tying up occur more frequently and severely.

Current recommendations suggest that keeping the amount of energy supplied by starch and sugars at 20% or less of the total digestible energy intake will help reduce the incidence and severity of tying up. In real terms, this means keeping grain intake at or below 3 to 4 kg/day for a 500 kg horse.

Tip 2 – Use oils and high energy fibres to supply additional energy. Three to 4 kg of grain or grain based feeds is not going to be able to supply enough energy to maintain a horse in full training, so additional sources of energy must be fed.

Current recommendations suggest that horses with RER should be receiving 20 to 25% of their daily digestible energy intake as oil. In real terms this means adding up to 3 cups of oil per day to the daily feed of a 500 kg horse in heavy work. With these very high levels of oil, care must be taken to introduce it gradually to the diet over 3 to 4 weeks to allow time for the horse and its gut to adapt to that level of oil feeding.

High energy fibres like lupin hulls, sugarbeet pulp and soybean hulls or high fibre grains like lupins are also valuable in providing energy in the diets of horses prone to tying up.

Tip 3 – Feed a balanced diet that meets requirements for the electrolyte minerals sodium, chloride, potassium and magnesium and requirements for the antioxidants selenium and vitamin E. Avoiding very high levels of protein is also a good idea. To this end, the use of good quality grass or oat hay as the forage base of the diet is preferable to using pure lucerne hay for horses prone to tying up.

Tip 4 – Avoid oats. Anecdotally, oats seem to trigger RER tying up in horses and particularly fillies more frequently than other grains, though it is not clear why. So for horses prone to tying up use cooked grains like corn, barley and rice in place of oats.

Tip 5 – Reduce or remove the grains or grain based feeds from the diet on days off. Horses fed their full ration on rest days seem to be more likely to be affected by tying up once they resume work. You should increase the horse’s allocation of hay or chaff to compensate for the feed you have taken out of their diet on rest days.

Combine good feeding with good management

A well balanced diet containing the right amount of energy from fibre, starch and oil with all requirements for vitamins and minerals being met is only part of the puzzle for effectively managing tying up.

Horses that suffer with tying up should be allowed to gradually build up fitness and care must be taken to ensure they are never exerted beyond their level of fitness. Prolonged periods of stall confinement should be avoided, with horses that tie-up being better kept in yards so they can move around freely. Where this is not possible, they should be given as much time out of their box (picking grass, on a walker or being hand walked) as practical.

Rest days need to be managed carefully. While these horses certainly do need some time off, they should never be fully box rested, but instead should be walked, swum or turned out for voluntary exercise on these days.

Nervous horses that are prone to RER should be managed to keep their stress levels down. A few things that might help include; always stable them with a buddy close by, allow them plenty of turn-out time where possible, exercise and feed them first, try to avoid any sort of exercise or situation that increases their level of excitement or nervousness and maintain as regular a daily routine as possible.

Avoiding the knots

Following good dietary management by keeping grain intake low, providing up to 25% of daily energy intakes as oil, meeting all essential vitamin and mineral requirements including those for electrolytes and antioxidants and providing a regular exercise routine that remains within the horse’s level of fitness will all help to keep your tying up prone horses muscles ... untied.

The Pryde’s EasiFeed range includes feeds suitable for horses that tie up. EasiPerformance, a non-oat sweetfeed, ReBuild, a high fat, low starch energy supplement with extra vitamin E, organic selenium and vitamin B1 and EasiOil, high quality cold pressed canola oil are all valuable additions to an anti-tie up diet. These feeds can be fed as follows (based on a 500 kg horse):

EasiPerformance

ReBuild

EasiOil

The amount of EasiPerformance and ReBuild should be reduced by half or more on rest days with the amount of hay increased to compensate for the weight of feed reduced. The amount of hay being fed can be reduced in the lead up to a race to reduce gut fill.

Usage (per Day)

Product

4 kg

Pryde’s EasiPerformance

1 kg

Pryde’s ReBuild

500 ml

Pryde’s EasiOil

4 kg

Oaten or Grass Hay

1 kg

Oaten Chaff

1 kg

Lucerne Chaff

Feeding horses that tie up isn’t easy and a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach may not work for your horses. For professional help with putting together a feeding program for susceptible horses in your stable, please contact Pryde’s EasiFeed on 1300 732 267, email info@prydes.com.au or go to our Feed Selector

Dr Nerida Richards
Equilize Horse Nutrition Pty Ltd