Intolerance & Allergies
Have you ever had a horse that has reacted badly when you changed his diet? Perhaps he became very spooky, fizzy or excitable or suffered from loose droppings or even mild colic? Did your horse suffer from unexplainable lumps and bumps? Or does he have a dull scurfy coat? Perhaps your horse suffers from one or more of these problems at the moment but you just don’t seem to be able to get to the bottom of it? If this sounds familiar it might be time you took a closer look at his diet.
For some horses, normally nutritionally sound ingredients appear to cause unexpected and unwanted reactions. Individual horses react differently, but food intolerances may affect your horse's health and behaviour in many ways:
Excitable or ‘bolshy’ behaviour
Unexplained lumps and bumps
Itchy or scurfy skin
Loose or watery droppings
Recurrent bouts of low-grade colic
Feed allergies in horses are rare, while intolerance to a specific feed ingredient appears to be much more commonplace, and the incidence seems to be growing in horses as it is in humans.
In the western world, for example, allergies to wheat are growing in humans as this is one of the most commonly found foods, while in horses, intolerances to common feed ingredients such as barley and molasses also seem to be increasing.
Allergies
Feed Allergy – something that the horse eats causes its immune system to react.
A true allergy can be diagnosed with the aid of a simple blood test, which will show whether a specific allergen causes an increase in antibodies. However, blood tests used in veterinary medicine are not yet 100% reliable and may yield several false positives.
Intolerances
Feed intolerance – the horse’s system consistently reacts abnormally to particular feed ingredients, but does not provoke the immune system to react.
In humans, doctors now recognise that there are several acute and chronic conditions that are affected, and in some cases caused by, a negative reaction to food. However, these are not always caused by antibodies sparking off a true immune reaction as with allergies, although the immune system may still be involved in a different way. The same appears to be true for horses. The difficulty with this is that if particular antibodies are not involved in the reaction, then blood tests that measure the antibodies produced by a certain food or feed are of no use in detecting the problem.
By Process of Elimination…
Many horses live quite happily with low level sensitivities to foods that you may never even have been aware of, and only become a problem when their health is compromised in some other way such as suffering infection, some stress, trauma or injury, or being generally run down.
Using supplements or topical skin creams to cover up these problems is like repeatedly taking painkillers for recurrent headaches without finding out what is causing the problem. If the problem is not addressed, then eating foods which the body is not able to digest satisfactorily will further stress the system, and the number of foods to which your horse reacts may grow.
The only guaranteed way of discovering whether your horse’s health problems are caused by an intolerance to specific feed ingredients is by undertaking an elimination diet. This involves feeding only products that do not contain the suspected offending ingredient for a period of two to four weeks; seeing if the horse improves; and then challenging it by feeding those ingredients again and seeing if things get worse. The most difficult situation is when a number of ingredients appear to be involved.
If you are concerned in any way about your horse’s health, the first step is to contact your vet.
Your vet may recommend implementing an elimination diet to try and establish the root of your horse’s problems.
Example Original Diet
Haylage
Alfalfa chaff (also contains molasses)
Low energy cool mix (contains barley, molasses and alfalfa)
Calming supplement
Stable lick
Suggested New Elimination Diet
Soaked meadow hay or high fibre haylage
Low energy mix (barley-free, alfalfa-free and molasses-free)
Unmolassed oat straw chaff if available, or dried grass if more energy required
Over a period of at least 7-10 days, gradually feed a little less of each of the original items, and introduce small quantities of the new feed, increasing them slowly according to your horse’s condition and energy levels. If you notice an improvement on the new diet, but would still like to feed a particular supplement or chaff that your horse was previously on, then re-introduce it gradually, but only one thing at a time – that way you can see whether or not your horse can tolerate that particular item.
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