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Maintaining Gut Tips

Ulcers are extremely painful for horses and these can vary from minor to severe and everything in between. A horses’ digestive system is designed for a constant trickle of forage, therefore the acid pump in the stomach never turns off. This is why it is imperative your horse never go without forage.

Here are some helpful tips:

Ensure forage at all times in the form of either grass, hay, chaff, haylage or a combination of these.

Always feed premium forages to avoid digestive upsets. Poor quality hay for example can harbour harmful dusts and molds and upset the stomach. For good doers premium hay can always be briefly soaked to reduce sugars.

Fibre is a natural stomach buffer. Therefore, make fibre number 1 on your feed list. A horse is designed to process fibre and ensures chewing and bicarbonate to reduce the stomach acidity.

Ensure fibre is fed before travelling or riding. This can be in the form of any of the above. This will provide a matting to the stomach helping to soak up and prevent acid splash which causes gut ulcers.

Ensure your horse is not hungry or not underfed. This will make your horse grumpy and also encourage ulcers. If your horse is on restriction always provide hay (or soaked hay). But do not deprive them of fibre.

Ensure plenty of clean fresh water to wash down all the fibre! Lots of dry fibre without adequate hydration can cause severe gut pain and or an impaction colic.

In hot conditions, some hay can be briefly wet down and spread across the ground to provide more hydration. Be careful if not eaten immediately as it will undergo fermentation in hot weather (if not eaten readily). Likewise mash feeds with plenty of water will aid hydration through the gut.

TOP TIPS

Provide forage always

Make diet changes gradually

Recognize gut pain and act immediately

More tips!

Provide a salt lick to promote extra drinking and hydration in hot weather. This will also will make your horse feel full and buffer acidity.

Address ulcers. These are extremely painful to the horse. Use a veterinary treatment to get stomach under control such as Gastro Pal (www.vetpost.co.nz) and once under control consider using Gastro-S (NPC Health) to maintain a healthy gut and also a gentle soothing gel like substance to coat the gut helping to protect.

Ensure worming is up to date. Encysted red worm causes major gut irritation and not to be confused with ulcers. A moxidectin active wormer should be used every spring and autumn. A FEC will not detect encysted redworm. This is also the most damaging of worms and a cause of colitis, bleeding to scarring and long term damage of the gut and intestinal lining. Never underestimate the damage of worms.

Avoid grains if your horse is sensitive in the gut. Replace with rice bran feeds or mash type rations high in fibre or stick with straight fibre.

Avoid large meals, this is a sure to upset your horses digestive system. Feed smaller meals breaking into two smaller feeds and fed twice daily if required.

Make any changes to your horses diet slowly and always ensure if grass is green and growing that your horse has access to extra fibre such as hay. Be sure to also accustom your horse slowly to rich grass.

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