I, and many others, feel your pain. Remember the ancestry of TB’s are from a mix from deserts and the UK. I have asked before, how do you feed a Paso, an Icelandic and an Arabian all living in Biloxi Mississippi?

Horses are nomadic – they migrate seasonally much like New Yorkers drive south to FL in winter. When we become responsible for a… Read more

I think that most DOD diseases including osteochondrosis dessecans (OCD) develop in utero or early after birth in horses overfed with feed in excess of their daily needs. This leads to rapid growth of the bones from which OCD, epiphysitis and contracted tendons occur. These are secondary to the over feeding which causes the genetic… Read more

Kathy and I knew of the research and the researchers doing the growth studies at Cornell. They were actively working on the cause of developmental orthopedic diseases of foals (DOD). The bottom line is that foals will achieve their genetic potential for growth but pushing it to occur faster (or increasing their size) only led to DOD.… Read more

1) Do we want any fat on the horse’s body? Like do my “skinny” horses (which I would say is 2 of them) need more muscle or fat or both? What I’m seeing on why I think they are skinny: More ribs visible, hip bone, top of butt. Only one of these horses has been a “chronically” skinny horse and the other one I think is growing.… Read more

https://www.thehorsesadvocate.com/horse-lymphangitis/

@Kerry I know this doesn’t add anything to what you can read online. I decided to make it a little different based on experience rather than repeating what the others say. Let me know if this helps and if you know a ka-zillionaire willing to research this.

Thanks for the reminder…. And now there is a reminder in my reminder system for this weekend.

I would often get phone calls from horse owners worried that their horses were urinating blood after some snow had fallen. In every case there was a trace mineral salt block available. Removing it would clear up the dark red urine spot in the white snow.

When I collected during from ponies in metabolism stalls, the colors of using stratified… Read more

What a fascinating question provoking me to read some to understand what rain water really is. And as usual I found conflicting answers depending on what part of the world it came from. And all involved humans.

From what I can tell, drinking collected rain water has no ill effects in humans and assume in horses. Rain water is more… Read more

Thank you for this reference.

I am starting to realize that a flexible diet is what works. A bit of this and a bit of that. Take down a bison and eat it and then go without meat for a long time. The natural ebb and flow of the seasons. Lush pasture then dormant pasture plus miles of migration. Give the digestive tract and metabolism a chance… Read more

Thanks @AngelaM – it is amazing to think that what we eat can affect our disposition. Oops. I mean what our horses eat….

🤠👍

The information on FFA’s in horses is limited to agenda driven bias from what I can see. This information is lean in horses as well versus what is known in humans. Because of this we need to step back and look at the general picture.

What should horses eat? They evolved eating ground plants and they migrated to find these. Today there is… Read more