HEALTH & EDUCATION

Health & Education

We all want the best care possible for our horses. The Heath & Education section covers both Learning Institutions, Organizations as well as many sources for equine assistance including Veterinarians and Farriers.

For those who want a to formally study horses, the Education section includes College Riding, Equine Studies, and Veterinary Schools. Learn about the wide variety of horses in the Horse Breeds section. Supplements and Treatments Therapy are also included in the section.

Everyone can learn from Fine Art and there are some specialty Museums that might surprise you.

Horses as a therapy partner enrich the lives of the disabled. These facilities are listed in our Therapeutic Riding section. To help children and young adults build confidence and grow emotionally, please see the resources available on the Youth Outreach page.

Looking for a place to keep your horse? You can find it in the Horse Boarding section. Traveling? Find a Shipping company or Horse Sitting service if your horse is staying home!

Want to stay up to date with the latest training clinics or professional conferences? Take a look at our Calendar of Events for Health & Education for the dates and locations of upcoming events.

Do we need to add more? Please use the useful feedback link and let us know!

by Juliet M. Getty, Ph.D.

We know they’re out there. Horses who are enjoying life. Horses who are brimming with health – strong muscles, shiny coats, hard hooves, good digestion, normal metabolism, strong immune function – just plain healthy! How does this happen? What is it about their care and feeding that gives them such wellbeing?

We’re always searching for answers. Our typical approach is to study sick horses. But that only helps us to understand disease. We look at fat horses to understand fat horses. We look at horses with pain, metabolic problems, and digestive ailments to understand those who are experiencing the same hardships. While such research is worthwhile, wouldn’t it also make sense to evaluate fit, hearty horses so we can strive to make our own horses be more like them? Shouldn’t we be looking at what healthy horses experience?

Here’s the basic “recipe” for a healthy horse:

Avoid feeding excess calories. Obesity is a real problem and it comes from piling on the calories, combined with lack of physical activity. Forage should be the dietary staple and it should flow steadily throughout the horse’s entire gastrointestinal tract. Pounds and pounds of concentrated feeds can shorten a horse’s life.

Horse Health: Equine Influenza and How to Minimize Your Risk

by Jen Roytz

Biosecurity should be a year-round concern for any farm, equine competition venue or other location in which horses are kept, but recent outbreaks of communicable diseases around the world have horsemen on heightened alert.

More recently, an outbreak of equine influenza in an active training yard prompted the cancellation of racing at tracks throughout Britain. More locally, nine horses have now been confirmed positive for equine influenza after being stabled at the World Equestrian Center, an equestrian competition venue in Columbus, Ohio. Several other horses who had recently competed at the facility were diagnosed with the virus once they returned to their home base in Indiana.

Dr. Amy Gill, PhD Equine Nutritionist

Hot, dry weather is on the rise across the country and will continue throughout the summer months. This type of environment poses challenges for horse owners in keeping their horses healthy and comfortable. Keeping horses hydrated and cool are of paramount importance during hot, dry weather.

Water is needed by the horse for body fluid balance, digestive function and thermoregulation. Lack of water is more rapidly fatal than lack of feed. Therefore, utmost attention should be paid to water quality and availability particularly when the ambient temperature remains high for long periods of time. Here are tips and suggestions for making sure your horse stays hydrated:

• Be sure to aggressively treat any horse with diarrhea and do not leave a sick horse out in direct sunlight.

• Be sure the water available is cool, preferably in the shade or under shelter. Water out in direct sunlight will become hot very quickly and be intolerable to the horse; change the water several times daily if it is heating up. Keep an eye on herd dynamics around a water source to make sure everyone is getting a drink. If the water trough is being dominated by one horse, be sure to make additional water sources available.

• Feed free choice forage (hay, hay cubes or pelleted forages) to encourage drinking. Water intake is directly related to how much dry matter is consumed. Eating forage triggers the thirst response because it absorbs water from the intestinal tract.

Eleanor M. Kellon, VMD

Everyone has heard about the ketogenic diet by now, or "keto" for short. It is basically a reinvention of the Atkins diet with more emphasis on eating fat. Fasting, starvation, and no or low, simple carbohydrate diets trigger a higher rate of fat oxidation to spare glucose. In omnivores and dogs, a by-product of fat oxidation is the production of ketones — hence the name.

The best diet for EMS horses is similar to ketogenic in that simple carbohydrate intake is very low. However, carb and fat calories are replaced by fiber calories. That very basic fact of equine nutrition and physiology is ignored by a proposal to treat EMS with a ketogenic diet.

Even mild dehydration can have an effect on performance. Once you know the basics, it's not that difficult to supplement electrolytes correctly, but many people don't know how - and the consequences may be taking more of a toll than is realized.

Electrolytes are minerals that exist in the body in their free, ionized form - i.e. carrying an electrical charge. Cations like calcium, potassium and sodium have positive charges. Anions like chloride, bicarbonate and sulfate are negative.

Movement of electrolytes makes excitatory activity possible, such as muscles contracting, nerves firing and the heart beating. Electrolyte concentrations and gradients also allow the body to hold normal amounts of water (hydration) and the kidneys to adjust the concentration of urine.

Sweat is a major avenue of loss for sodium, potassium, chloride and to a lesser extent calcium and magnesium, but it's not the only avenue.

Muzzle Adjustments May Prevent Teeth Damage

by: Joyce Harman, DVM

Muzzles are often accused of damaging the horse’s front teeth. This can be true, but it's important to put it in the correct context. A grazing muzzle prevents a horse from overeating grass, which can save her life, or at least save the horse a bad case of laminitis and the owner thousands of dollars in veterinarian bills. However, as with everything in life, a bit of knowledge and common sense will make wearing a muzzle much less damaging. Horses that crib or run their teeth on bars in the stall often wear their teeth much more than what occurs with a muzzle, yet muzzles get the blame for tooth damage.

12 Stretches to Release Lower Back and Hip Pain In Riders

by Dressage Rider Training

In this article, I will run through rider back stretches and hip mobility work to help release lower back and hip pain in riders.

The human body has this amazing ability to heal itself. At any age and in nearly any state especially when given the right environment to do so. Our body will put up with a huge amount of silly movement and poor lifestyle choices for a long time because we have a large amount of functional tolerance built into us.

However we shouldn’t abuse this high tolerance and instead, we should ensure we listen and take care of our body on a daily basis. Because those little signs and symptoms that do appear can turn into bigger uglier problems later on if not taken care of. Just as a tree moulds to its environment over the years from the different weather patterns, so too does our body.

So if that environment is creating niggles and imbalances, which you ignore and only fix the symptoms, it could continue to be an issue for much longer. So given that we have this amazing body that can repair and heal itself with the right tools and environment it makes sense that we would want to pay attention to both areas when aiming to improve our rider wellbeing.

These rider back stretches and exercises are designed to help relieve lower back or hip pain, which is an incredibly common problem and often created because of the environment our bodies are placed in each and every day. So as much you want to do these stretches, pay attention to other possible changes you can make to your daily life. Such as when we sit this can be for long durations at a time and this can cause tightness in our hamstrings, shoulders, hip flexors, and compression in our lower back. To combat this, consider adding in more standing and walking into your day. Try this, for every 30 minutes of sitting you do per day, aim to do 2 minutes of walking or aim to spend 50% of your day on your feet, be it with a stand-up desk or walking meetings.

by Jen Roytz

We’ve all heard the saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” Horses have to be thirsty in order to consume water, and the lynchpin in that scenario is salt.

Dehydration in horses–or any animal–can quickly escalate from mild to catastrophic. Their internal environment is water-based, and salt is the driving force behind the regulation and distribution of water in and out of cells.

“Salt is 39% sodium and 61% chloride. When consumed, salt will split in the body into the separate minerals to be used independently (as electrolytes),” said Dr. Kathleen Crandell, PhD, a nutritionist with Kentucky Equine Research (KER). “Both these minerals have independent roles in the body, but mainly they work together balancing fluid movement in and out of the cells and acid-base balance, as well as electrical impulse conduction in nerves and muscles. Further, sodium is needed for transport of substances across cell membranes, like glucose.”

The more a horse exercises and sweats, the more water they need to consume to prevent dehydration, and as such the more salt they require in their diet. While forage, grass and concentrated feeds contain salt, it is not enough to adequately meet a horse’s dietary needs, especially a high-performance equine athlete, such as a racehorse, making proper salt supplementation key.

A Kansas State University associate professor and a Toklat and Myler bit expert outline warning signs for horse owners.

While enjoying a ride with your best horse, she throws her head in frustration and pins her ears. You chalk it up as an off day, one of many as of late, but it could be much more than that. “It is important to understand what the bit is doing and what to watch for,” cautions Chris Blevins, MS, DVM, Associate Professor, Equine Field Service with Kansas State University. “It is our responsibility to keep our horses comfortable.”

If your horse is experiencing bit pain and discomfort, you may notice signs of bit resistance.

There are several signs of bit resistance,” says Judy Auble, with Toklat and Myler bits. “The best way to determine whether your horse needs a new bit is to pay attention to how your horse reacts to your rein action and rein pressure.”

Could it be time to change bits? Watch for these warning signs:

Inverting, when horses ride with their muzzles held high
Riding behind the vertical, as horses tuck their nose into the chest
Gaping, when horses drop their jaws behind the vertical, relieving tongue pressure
Running through the bit or being heavy on the bit
Riding with their tongue out of the mouth
Consistent throwing of head and pinning of ears