Despite the cold nights, the daytime temperature is now getting high enough for grass growth to really take off. This change in grass availability increases the risk of laminitis in susceptible horses and ponies (and donkeys!). It is important to remember that horses can easily eat the grass as fast as it grows, so you may not perceive the new growth!
Signs of laminitis include a stiff, ‘pottery’ gait in front, reluctance to move, hot feet and a bounding digital pulse. Unfortunately, damage to the feet at the cellular level has already occurred 2-3 days before we see the symptoms, so once lameness is present we are behind the curve! Prevention is most definitely better than cure.
Strategies to prevent laminitis begin with weight management – hopefully your horse will have lost weight over the winter, as evolution has designed them to do. The challenge now is to prevent or at least limit weight gain as the availability of grazing increases. Both the amount of food and the type of food eaten are important factors in managing laminitis risk.
A horse needs to eat 2% of its body weight as dry matter daily to maintain its weight. If it eats more, it will gain weight; if less, it will lose weight. A horse at grass will satisfy and even exceed its requirements just by grazing alone. We need to remember this when stabling horses overnight, so we don’t feed more forage than absolutely necessary.
Ways to limit grass intake include:-
– Limiting time spent grazing
– Limiting the area available for grazing (smaller paddocks)
– Using a grazing muzzle
– A combination of all three
Horses can increase their rate of eating enormously to compensate for periods of restriction, so whichever strategies you choose it is essential to stick to them all the time! For example, there is no benefit in keeping a pony on restricted grazing during the day and then turning them out on to long grass at night, as they will increase their intake on the longer grass to make up for the earlier restriction.
Ways to make forage last longer in the stable include:-
– Multiple haynets in different parts of the stable
– Multiple haynets used one inside the other to make it more difficult to get the hay out
– Hayballs (like treat balls, but with more and larger holes for hay)
– Forage blocks (hung in the middle of the stable, so the horse can’t easily bite into them)
Dietary changes
The trigger for laminitis is an abnormally high blood insulin which persists over a period of time. To limit the risk of laminitis risk, we need to choose feeds that cause as small an insulin spike as possible – salad instead of cheesecake!
Where possible, feed hay not haylage – the insulin spike triggered by haylage is much greater than after feeding hay. Read the ingredients list of any balancers, feeds or supplements you give carefully – watch out for molasses, sucrose, fructose, glucose, sugar. Mixes tend to be very sugary and are best avoided. Feed bags should also carry an indication of the energy density of the feed – most horses not in racing or advanced eventing need remarkably little hard feed.
Written by Sally Hodgson, BSc (Hons), MA, VetMB, Cert AVP (EM), MRCVS.
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