Digestive issues can happen anytime of the year, but in winter, alongside reduced turnout and exercise due to bad weather, and a change in feeding (To allow for the reduced/poor grazing) tummy troubles can happen more frequently.

Han Van De Braak, MD of organic aloe vera supplement Aloeride, explains further and examines the triggers and how horse owners can help avoid problems this season…

“Perhaps the biggest winter worry is colic, which happens in around 10-11 percent of the general horse population and it may surprise you that in most human studies, the level of occurrence similarly ranges from 10-15 percent. So what’s going on? In olden days doctors used the descriptive term ‘Spastic Colon’ for what we now know as IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome, with subsections IBS-C, IBS-D and alternating IBS). The smooth muscle lining of the large intestine (colon) goes into spasm and in horses this can lead to life threatening twisting of the colon known as strangulation. A Swedish study in 2008 found that the survival after equine colic at 1 month was 76% (95% confidence interval: 75–78%)¹. In humans the colon doesn’t twist so readily, it ‘just’ causes cramps that can be very painful indeed.

Equine colic is associated with several triggers and causative factors. Thus it may seem difficult to be specific when it comes to how to avoid it, so let’s start with what can trigger spasm.

A common sequence is for local irritation to cause inflammation which often goes accompanied by pain and muscles responding with reactive spasm. This affect the pressure on / the stretch of the intestinal wall. Mechanical irritation can be caused by relative obstructions (impaction) such as sand, chunks of food, a large number of roundworms or equine tapeworm, or your horse bolting its feed. Sand is an avoidable trigger because you can check the grazing area and it is not exclusively a winter issue. Bolting is suggestive of an insatiable appetite, which usually means that your horse wants to correct deficiencies, so think upstream, who/what fed itself off the ingested nutrients? Failure to put condition on is another call to action, prevention is ‘King’ in colic.

Distant irritation – distant pain in non-contractile tissue – reactive spasm in contractile gut is another sequence that occurs in upstream issues such as gastric ulcers. A useful trick to check this is to gently run your finger tips from your horse’ breastbone and slide backwards along the midline, if your horse evades your hand then it is likely to have an irritated stomach. Review feed and feed regime and add an easy to administer herb that supports the protective mucosal barrier of the gut.

Local chemical irritation such as toxins from parasites, especially when deworming happens too fast, or when the horse is fed mouldy or spoilt feed. Note that during the hibernation stage, worms are encysted in the gut wall (thus not killed by most wormer drugs bar larvicidals) so upon maturity they’ll cause mechanical irritation, as well as gut toxicity via their metabolism. The old adage that 20 percent of horses carry 80 percent of the parasites is still a generally accepted rule among researchers. Some horses have a natural immunity to parasites and your cue is to enhance that. Base your deworming on faecal egg count reduction test (FECRT) and at the same time boost nutrients levels that can improve natural immunity. With three chemical classes of de-wormers available today, you should not rotate between drugs in any one class but instead you should rotate between the chemical classes.

Finally, there are the distant chemical trigger unrelated to GI itself – infectious disease, endotoxaemia such as implicated in laminitis and late pregnancy (causing colon displacement).

It is useful to see ulcers for what they are: Wounds exposed to a hostile environment, that is in an acidic environment when it comes to stomach ulcers, and food or further along, faecal matter when there are ulcers in the small or large intestine. Beyond veterinary diagnosis and treatment, you can feed to speed up the natural wound healing process.

So what can you as horse owners do help avoid colic? Make gradual changes to feeding, avoid overgrazing and use opened haylage bales within 4 days (Even sooner if the weather is warm) Ensuring that your horse has easy access to an abundance of clean water is key, providing adequate long-stem roughage in diet, deworming appropriately and help with herbs like Aloeride aloe vera powder to support digestive health/ function can also help to sustain a healthy gut. Capitalising on built-in immunity is a strategy I would always take because it helps reduce reliance on other approaches and reduce the chance of equine colic. Regular dental checks are imperative to ensure that teeth problems and pain don’t prevent your horse from eating correctly and ultimately causing issues”.

www.aloeride.com

1.- A. Egenvall,  J. Penell, B.N. Bonnett,  J. Blix, J. Pringle; Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine; Volume 22, Issue 4, pages 1029–1037, July–August 2008.