Feeding For Gut Health

Every horse owner knows that forage is the most important part of their horse’s diet, and forage should be the foundation of the horses ration to maintain optimum digestive health. Ensuring that fibre is first and foremost in your horse or pony’s diet helps to reduce the risks of diseases such as gastric ulcers, colic, stereotypies and endotoxaemia.

To maintain gut health this should mean that forage and fibre will be providing the most significant amount of the energy (calories) and nutrients that your horse is eating. However, despite this awareness, few people will have their forage analysed, many do not weigh it, and some do not realise that the difference in quantities of fibre in forages will have implications that might affect gut health and therefore the wellbeing and overall performance of their horse.

Providing a variation in forage and fibre sources, such as utilizing chaff buckets or even high fibre cubes or soaked fibres, together with regular paddock turnout will encourage your horses natural browsing and foraging instinct and allowing him to exhibit normal herd behaviour, are all important factors to helping to keep the digestive tract healthy.

Top Tips

• A healthy digestive tract depends upon fibre first
• Anything else that you feed is fed to balance the deficiencies of the forage, whether that is in terms of calories (energy) or micronutrients
• All horses should be fed a minimum of 1.5% of their body weight in forage per day, with this being offered on an ad-lib basis where possible. For a leisure horse, then this will be 90% + forage. For a competition horse, then this could vary from 80-50% forage and 20-50% concentrates by weight
• The feed value of the forage should be a key determinant in your choice of forage. For example, if haylage is fed, it must meet the dry matter requirements of the horse. High calorie forages might need soaking or replacing with lower calorie alternatives if you are managing good doers.

Forage and Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome

Perhaps one of the most well-known consequences of poor forage feeding and management is the increased risk of Equine Squamous Gastric Disease ESGD. Correct forage feeding is of foremost importance to reduce the risk of ESGD. Below are a few practical management tips that should be used to help maintain gastric health and overall gut health.

1. Where possible, offer ad-lib fibre in small haynets frequently. Good quality hay in small meals helps to increase chewing and saliva production, which helps to decrease the amount of gastrin produced by large haynets or through the feeding of lower quality forages.

2. Adjust haylage quantities to take into account the water content and ensure adequate fibre intake.

3. Add alfalfa to small meals or feed before a meal in order to support acid buffering and stimulation of saliva.

4. Ensure where possible that your horse has access to 2-3 hours of grazing a day.

Gut health and starch

Many of the health risks associated with the feeding of starch are simply due to inappropriate choice of feeds, and the way in which a starch-based feed is fed. For horses that are in work, if feeding management is considered, starch is a safe energy source, needlessly maligned. The key to successful, healthy feeding of starch is to maintain normal digestive physiological responses in both upper and lower guts and this can be done by following a few simple rules:

• Feeding low starch meals, either by choosing high calorie feeds that provide those calories using alternative calorie sources such as digestible fibres and oils or by making a high starch-based feed a low starch meal by feeding smaller but more frequent meals.

• Maximising digestion in the small intestine by choosing feeds where the cereals have been processed and cooked (micronizing or steaming) to increase their digestibility, helping to minimise any undigested starch from reaching the hindgut.

• Making sure that your horse eats and finishes a small fibre meal (0.9kg) of hay/ chaff before eating a meal containing a moderate amount of starch or sugar. If it is not possible to provide horses with a small amount of fibre before a meal, then try and ensure free access to hay, at least a few hours before a concentrate feed, to help slow the rate of intake of the concentrate feed

Gut health and supplements

Supplements that maintain or enhance digestive health fall into two categories:

• maintenance and optimisation of digestive function, - e.g., pre and probiotics,
• support for clinical issues - e.g. gastric ulcers.

Feeding a live yeast

There are four strains of live yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) permitted for use in the EU. Live yeast can be recommended short-term after any event which has disturbed the hindgut’s bacterial population to help create a more favourable environment to repopulate the hindgut with beneficial fibre digesting microbes, indirectly improving fibre digestion. However, there is no evidence that providing yeast to animals with a healthy microbial population will have any further beneficial effect.

Antacids and Equine Gastric Ulcers

There is some evidence to suggest that, as a preventative, feeds high in calcium carbonate, such as alfalfa, improve non-glandular gastric ulcer scores.

Antacids (aluminium or magnesium hydroxide or calcium carbonate), have a short-lived effect on horses, and while they may be used as a preventative, there is not sufficient evidence for their exclusive use in ulcer treatment. Ingredients such as beta glucans, Sea Buckthorn Berries, pectins, liquorice, antacids, and gum Arabic, have been shown to provide benefits for squamous ulcers, such as acid buffering, regulation of passage rate and protection of the stomach lining, however more research is required to determine to what extent they are beneficial, and to highlight optimum feeding rates.

Top tip - Diet and management should be addressed first as saliva is one of the best antacids you can ‘prescribe’.