Options for Ex-Racehorses

So you’ve got a laminitic horse, with all the visits from the veterinarian and farrier, special shoes, and X-rays, and possibly dire predictions for future soundness. You might have even spent some time on the Internet and dug up recommendations to do everything from standing the horse in mud for so many hours a day to shaking a dead chicken over each foot. But do you know what your laminitic horse should eat to maximize his chances of becoming sound again, and staying that way? Proper nutrition is important for any ill or injured patient, horse or human, trying to regain health. And for many horses, especially these days, diet is a direct contributor to disease.

How Feed can Factor into Laminitis

One needs to look no further than the local hangouts (such as malls and movie theaters) to see that today’s “improved” diets aren’t good for a lot of people, and the same is true of our horses. “Improved” high-carbohydrate grasses for pastures and hays were developed to increase weight and, thus, value in cattle, but they can have serious negative effects on horses.

Horses adapted over evolutionary time to move around a lot in a day, grazing what they could from prairie plants that are a far cry from today’s green, rolling pastures. The result? Horses today often eat far more calories as carbohydrates while getting far less exercise than they were designed for, and their metabolism often can’t cope. Something’s got to give and, unfortunately, what gives often involves the hooves. Diet-related laminitis isn’t simply a case of more body weight causing hooves to fail; a constant excess of calories causes a horse to gain body fat and throws his hormones out of whack, particularly insulin. Excess body fat is known to contribute to insulin resistance in horses, much like it contributes to insulin resistance and diabetes in humans.

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