Serene Sunday

Yippee, the time change makes it pitch dark at 6pm now!!  

Said no horse owner ever!

I'm gonna have to figure out something since now the weather is nice I want to play with ponies more!!

Horse Nutrition- what you don't know you don't know!

 I want to start this post out with stating:

I AM NOT AN EQUINE NUTRITIONIST

I am not offering any advice or suggestions.  I am merely documenting my discoveries in feed with my own horses.  I will link to sources as appropriate but for a full assessment of any animals diet please consult a certified equine nutritionist.  Veterinarians are not specialists in nutrition, they can help some but they have their specialty in disease prevention, lameness etc. etc.

I AM NOT AN EQUINE NUTRITIONIST

When I first owned horses I just just had Dani at a boarding facility that fed grass hay and I supplemented with some vitamin/mineral supplement from SmartPak.  Eventually I moved on to just using a Ration Balancer since I was sold on the idea that it was cheaper and still had a low feeding rate for an easy keeper that stayed quite healthy on just grass hay.

I never really had any issues.  Then with Chance he was on the same regimen here in NC.  Once Dani had laminitis and then Chance started loosing weight and not eating a Senior feed I had for him.  I started to delve in and learn a bit more.  I needed more fat for Chance but it needed to be low sugar and starch.

NSC description......... Low NSC feed is recommended for Insulin resistant horses and those with Cushings.  Check for Chance on Cushings and check for Dani on IR and Cushings.  The ration balancer I had Dani on was good but I found one with an even lower NSC level and lower feeding amount.  

Then in fall 2023 I broke down and got a hay probe ($150-$180 for these suckers!!) By then I had Seamus too and he is a young horse, so I was determined that I get more information about what I was feeding my horses.

What is in a hay test analysis?

Depends on what you purchase.  I went with a lower level analysis but it gave me a general idea of the nutrition and most important for my IR and cushings horses the sugar content.

Starch and WSC are used to estimate the NSChttps://extension.umn.edu/horse-nutrition/understanding-your-hay-analysis. Non-structural carbohydrates if in a higher level for sugar sensitive horses can then have an issue if these compounds are still undigested in larger amounts in the hindgut and can lead to laminitis. The NSC is calculated at 9% for this hay so well within the safe rang for my mare.   https://excelequinefeeds.com/non-structural-carbohydrates-in-equine-feeds/

The iron, zinc, and copper were what I wanted to figure out for my black horse Seamus.  The imbalance in these minerals can cause sun bleaching but also in my research I've learned that having a prolonged excess of Iron in the diet can have issues for IR horses.  It does not cause insulin resistance, a common misconception, but either way, mineral imbalances are not good for any horse

The ratio of zinc and copper should be 3:1 and the max iron intake should be around 400mg per day https://madbarn.com/iron-for-horses/

Based on the hay I am feeding, and typical of most forage, my horses are getting more than enough iron.  

But feeds and even ration balancers all seem to have ADDED Iron!!!!

The Meta Safe ration balancer that I have been using do to an extremely low NSC was adding an additional 200mg of iron! My soil is high in iron as is my water and I don't have those numbers to compute at this time.  I was shocked.  Iron is rarely a deficiency in horses, usually quite the opposite.  Asking why they add iron to feeds is a topic for another day. 

My quest was to find a low feed rate ration balancer or supplement that would balance the minerals for my horses and provide added benefits like biotin and amino acids. Some of the best I found were Blue Bonnet 101 and California Trace...but the cost for feeding two horses was a bit steep for me. I finally found Ucklele's Sport Horse Grass Pellets 

I was pleased with the ratios and the ingredients, it's always a give and take.  I also wanted to add more zinc and copper, in proper ratios to counteract the still higher iron levels that are endemic to the area. https://thehorse.com/16846/coppers-impact-on-equine-coat-color/ 

Hopefully this will help with Seamus's fading summer coat but also continue to improve both his and Dani's coats, hooves and overall balanced health.  Neither needs extra calories!  The transition will happen soon as I am getting down to the very end of the last bag of MetaSafe.

Seamus with Northern Lights from Oct. 10, 2024
(blurry since it was handheld long exposure)

And if any were curious, Chance's feed doesn't have added iron.  He's bay but I've not noted any bleaching of his dark mane and tail.  I will most likely run through his nutritional balance soon as well. Addressing the copper and zinc deficiencies seemed more pressing at this time!

Serene Sunday

Chance has kept on weight for the summer!  This is a win for us!

Is Seamus really a black horse?

 Horse coat color is apparently complicated. Many people think they have a black horse but they don't or they have a black horse that doesn't look black in the summer. Seamus is registered black with the Kentucky Mountain Saddle Horse Association. I didn't quite believe it since he started to look like a sooty buckskin or bay in the summer with his coat bleaching. Maybe he was actually bay or had a dun gene?

The day he arrive at Geek Acres he was black....yes tips of the mane and tail had some fading but that is common in a lot of horses and hence why many bag their show horses tails.  I don't care.  I keep them as tidy as I can in while being in the fields living like a horse.

In February and March horses begin to lose their winter coats.  It was apparent some of his worn out winter coat hairs, the lighter ones were getting ready to shed and the darker coat was coming in.

By May he was a shiny blackish color, I would say dark bay without having seen any genetic results.

As the heat came on and the summer sun blazed on he would continue to fade.  I would rinse him after rides or really hot days but honestly, who can do that everyday in the NC summer heat?  I don't want to keep a sheet on him, even a fly sheet unless really necessary. Even with a mesh fly sheet there is still a lot of heat held in and that just seems miserable!!

He certainly looks like a dark bay or seal brown horse in some of these images.  What I find interesting is the spotted quality.  Note the lighter hairs and then the splotches of black hair speckled throughout and then patches of darker areas on his neck.  That is weird.....right?

This year the end of June hit and Seamus was pretty much a bay, or sooty buckskin in looks.

Last fall when his old summer coat shed the darker hairs were coming in.  In October at an obstacle clinic here he is with a dark, shiny coat once again!

He must be a fancy hypercolor horse like those heat activated shirts from the early 90's!!

I decided to get him genetically tested.  I also took a look at diet, in particular microminerals. The black coat, any dark coat for that matter, requires a higher a level of certain minerals to produce the melanin.  I'd had him on a balancer for grass hay and then supplemented with Nuhoof which has.....you guessed it Zinc and copper in it which is also one of the requirements for hoof growth.  Makes sense right?  Hooves and hair have keratin as a main component. He should have been getting what he needed.

The test results were in....

Guess what color Seamus 's genetic report indicated?

Black.

He is "EE"- meaning no red factor, these are two dominant alleles, Red is recessive, you need two recessives "ee" to show the Red phenotype (aka Daenerys). An "Ee" horse would not be Red, since you need two recessive "e's" to express the red color but could obviously pass on that gene....not gonna go down the Punnett squares explanation. So many resources online if you want to really delve into it and learn!!

Agouti affects the distribution of black pigment if a horse has any, "Ee" or "EE".

Seamus is "aa" for Agouti. A bay horse only needs one dominant "A" to have the black coloration restricted to just the points just the points like in a bay (mane, tail and legs Aa, AA). If there are two recessive copies then the distribution is over the entire body of the horse (aka black)

Lastly there is no Dun dilution gene; he is nd2/nd2 (Dun horse dilution genes)

So he is black.  Any fading I am seeing is caused by  1) Nutrition and 2) Environment.

I can only do so much with the environment so I will focus on nutrition since even with my supplementation there is an imbalance somewhere even though I have made sure to up the intake of Zinc and Copper.  What is going on?

I will save that investigation for another post since it involves several Excel spreadsheets, hay testing and lots of "WTFs?" to be honest....

The Hoof Saga

When I first purchased Seamus I knew that his feet or any other horses feet were not going to be up to my standards.  I keep barefoot trimmed horses and many gaited horses are not trimmed in a balanced way....why I don't know.  Also most of them are shod with metal shoes.  Not against metal shoes but I prefer to have the hoof as natural as possible without the nails hammered into the wall and a metal shoe that prevents the frog from reaching the ground, the hood from flexing etc etc.  

Seamus's feet were terrible, I'd already written about his feet when I first got him.  In the muddy sales situation I didn't get the best look and the vet check did fail to not the coronary band injury.  He wasn't lame, he moved great and even with the knowledge that there was a hoof issue I would have probably gone ahead with the purchase after delving in deeper I'm sure like a previous horse I'd liked; who I'd had hoof radiographs done and ended up finding an issue that made me decide to move on.  

Seamus's hooves flared at the quarters, most due when they are too long between trims.  Also some nail heads were still present in the hoof.  Over the winter he was left to pasture and the shoes just left to fall off....otherwise a farrier would have pulled all the nails right?  

The coronary band injury scan be seen as a nick in the hairline and then there is a flap of hard hoof wall a little to the left and down in the picture above. We were going to see if it would grow out.

His freshly trimmed hooves above sure do look nice!  Below are is the hoof several months, maybe even 6 months later.  You can see a ridge where he was living here, on a different diet and getting a great barefoot trim.  The abnormality looks like it's growing out.  It still is a flap on the hoof sort of but further up it almost appears to be solid wall.

In comes mud season and that flap ended up curling outwards like a terrible hangnail.  I had to keep clipping it off and it would keep growing back.  

Then with more mud and a feisty young 6 year old horse that loves to bounce about, Seamus must have bumped it since the flap was now 90 degrees out from the rest of the hoof.

When I clipped it this time, I hit living tissue and it began to bleed.  Something definitely needed to be done.  My farrier suggested I consult with my vet.  It would need to be cut out and then cauterized.  Supportive shoes would be needed.  Of course my vet was referring to nailed in hooves but my farrier had some tricks up her sleeves with a modified hoof boot and antimicrobial adhesive.  There is so much that can be done with the hoof that doesn't include nail holes and upsetting the integrity of the hoof wall.

So we arranged to have my farrier come out shortly after the hoof procedure scheduled with my vet.  Seamus was sedated and then the hoof was scrubbed.

A block was injected in the area and then the "hangnail" cut out.

After that a farrier file was heated with a torch and used to cauterize the wound.

The first day I kept Seamus in a stall bedded with fine pine shavings.  He didn't really like being in the stall but I wanted to make sure he didn't try to run around too much, even in the small barnyard.

My farrier used a Renegade glue on for support for both his back hooves.  They would restrict the movement of the hoof and coronary band for a couple weeks as the area healed.  Of course since this is Seamus we are talking about he managed to loose the unwrapped hoof shoe within a few days so my farrier came out a few days later to check on him and it was deemed okay to remove the other boot.

I also had to wrap the back foot and apply a bandage with ointment for the first 5 days.  This proved to be a bit difficult and I ended up most likely receiving some hairline fractures to my left foot when Seamus kicked downwards to the ground right where my foot was.  It was the most pain I've experienced related to my foot and horses! I've been stepped on many times, including this silly guy and that sure hurt.  This was terrible, I'm sure some distant neighbors wondered what that sound was echoing in the rolling hills.

Since I could wiggle my toes I didn't think I needed to go to the ER. The bruising increased over the days and spread over my foot, even far from where I was kicked.  I'll spare you yet another horse inflicted bruise pic.

Two months later and I still have a raised area at the base of my middle toes and slight loss of feeling when you touch the area.  Probably scar tissue.  Oh well, not much a doctor could have done if it was hairline fractures anyways!

I worked with Seamus to deal with the handling of his back hoof.  He didn't like feeling the loose bandages as they are being removed.  I have plans to work on him some desensitizing him to ropes and other "tickly" things on his pastern area.  Of course with my body and feet well away!  But that is a future plan.  We've been getting past the ridiculous heat the past two months so there hasn't been much desire for horse activities.

Two months later....I'm hoping this thing will grow out and not peel up again.  The line I kind of see indicates that it may still be a separate piece of wall. So I'll have to keep an eye on it.  I also try to get a better picture of a cleaner hoof!  There is mud and drips on his hoof from the pasture so it's kinda hard to really see the hoof wall and of course the booger moved for that second pic.

If I need to I may try Hoof Armor like I have used for Dani when trying to grow out more sole for her hooves. It's basically an epoxy but it's abrasion and water resistant so might be a good away to prevent any flap from peeling up.  Only time will tell. At least he's well healed and getting to the time of year that it's gonna start cooling off and we can get back to fun pony activities again!!