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Horse Care – squirts
Hi Doc T. Our horse Silver has just started to suffer with the squirts after a few days on fresh pasture. This happens most summers. He’s an energetic 23 year old thoroughbred cross and a good doer. We’re strip feeding him on the pasture to limit his intake while our other horse eats what he wants of the same pasture but he never suffers with the squirts. We are almost grain fee with both horses but Silver has very little in any event We also find that haylage causes the squirts with Silver in the winter. I’d be grateful for your help to try to resolve this. Many thanks!
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1 Reply
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What makes a horse have “squirts” – what the profession now calls FFW or Fear Fecal Water – is the inappropriate bacteria in the gut being fed food that causes their overgrowth. This occurs in humans and horses when there is not a broad diversity of gut bacteria. This is especially common in older horses with chronically inflamed intestines.
The best way to correct this is to remove all inflammatory ingredients (grain, grain by-products, treats, supplements and anything else other than forage). But it isn’t always as simple as this because of age, stress (physical, environmental, emotional) and season.
Age is another way of saying the gut microbes have been causing inflammation for longer than in a young horse. It is the chronicity that needs patience to correct. However this may be harder to do when the heat of summer, the increased sugar of growing summer grass plus any other stress such as over crowding (4 horses on 1 acre) or a new horse, new farm or even new barn help.
If all other stresses are improved to the best of your ability then just decrease or eliminate access to the fresh summer pasture. The combination of sugar in the growing grass PLUS the grain (ANY amount of grain) is just feeding the gut microbes causing the issue. Removing all foods other than water, mined salt and hay (or better yet, soaked hay to remove excess sugar) will help the competing gut microbes thrive. The result is a greater diversity of microbes and the elimination of FFW.
There is another member here that had abundant FFW with a soiled hind end (not in the forums yet). The only way we resolved it was with elimination of all grain PLUS elimination of pasture PLUS soaking the hay. It stopped but we have not had an update since it stopped. I am assuming the issue has resolved. The idea here is to starve the offending bacteria and allow the good competition to re-establish their place in the gut.
By the way, adding the @ sign plus the first letter of a member’s name will bring up any member here with that 1st letter. Clicking on the member in the pop-up will notify the member that you are connecting what you are writing to them. I will do this here: @Kerry
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