Laminitis and Founder are some of the most severe foot lamenesses that afflict horses. If laminitis is not recognized and treated as an emergency, most laminitis cases will turn into founder.
Once you understand the severity of laminitis and founder, you will see that laminitis is much easier to prevent than to cure! Sound, time-tested mechanical, as well as medical treatment regimens must be applied to have the greatest chance of success. Less attention to detail reduces the chance of recovery. Some horses will die, no matter how treated.
The seriousness of the laminitis problem in the U. S. can be seen in the results of the 1998 National Animal Health Monitoring System Equine Study by the USDA – APHIS.
74% Recovered
12% Showed no improvement, only got worse
8% Improved, but remained lame
6% Died, naturally or were euthanized
Seven Ways to Prevent Laminitis:
1. Feed consistent quality and quantity of feeds – give at least two feedings per day. Mismanagement due to overfeeding idle horses causes 70 to 80% of laminitis cases.
Horses have strong instinctive appetites. This characteristic serves them well in the wild. They spend the majority of a 24-hour day grazing low calorie forages. They move with a herd and get adequate exercise to burn up the calories in their feed.
When domesticated, a horse’s dominant grazing behavior is altered. If confined, they often develop vices with their mouths such as wood chewing and cribbing. If left on a lush pasture loaded with nutrients and calories, they may literally eat themselves to death. Free-choice grazing of sparse vegetation in the wild sustains them, while free- choice grazing in a fertilized and growing pasture can kill them.
It’s much easier to kill a horse with kindness in the form of too much feed than it is to hurt it by feeding it too little. Yet, we don’t want to do either. To do what is best for the horse, we must understand its physiology.
The horse has a relatively small stomach (about 10% of its digestive tract) that is designed to hold small amounts eaten frequently. For this reason it is a good practice to feed horses at least twice a day when they are confined to avoid colic (stomach ache).
Each idle horse needs only about 1 ½ % of its body weight in quality forage per day. This means a 1000 pound horse should get about 15 pounds of feed per day. If this is divided into two feedings, the horse should get about 7 ½ pounds each morning and each evening. Most string-tied bales weigh about 60 pounds. Since fifteen goes into sixty four times, in this example, a bale should last four days. In other words this horse should be fed 1/8th of a bale at each feeding. (Variance in hay quality may necessitate adjusting the amount fed.)
2. Make provision for idle horses to exercise.
3. Confine overweight horses to a dry lot with limited feed intake and no access to growing pasture.
4. Limit fructan intake by limiting grazing on sunny days after cool nights. Fructans translate into sugars when they are digested in the large intestine. Analyze pasture and hay grasses to determine levels of starch and fructans. Fructan levels should be below 13% in grass hay. Directions for testing hays can be obtained at www.safergrass.org.
5. Eliminate molasses and grains from the diet of at risk horses. Idle horses rarely need grain. Grain is useful to catch horses and to put weight on thin horses. Concentrate feeds high in sugar and starch are especially dangerous to older horses with Cushing’s disease.
6. Introduce any feed changes gradually over the course of a week.
7. Avoid toxins such as found in black walnut shavings and situations perceived as stressful by the horses when possible.
Remember! Prevention of laminitis is more successful than treatment!
