PrintCheck back every Wednesday through Aug. 18 for more articles in the Mobile Horses: Care On The Road series, sponsored by UlcerGard.You can find all the articles on our Mobile Horses page.
Most people who own horses are inadvertently looking for ways to make horse ownership convenient. The typical living situation for a show horse is far removed from the conditions in which wild horses have evolved to thrive.
We keep our horses in stalls because that makes horse care easier; we feed them processed grain because it’s difficult to provide enough quality forage to meet their nutritional needs; and we only offer them a few hours outside since most boarding barns have limited turnout. While this lifestyle might be convenient for people, it’s easy to forget the negative effects it may have on our horses.
When it comes to traveling and showing, we further take our horses out of their comfort zones by introducing strange horses, unfamiliar surroundings and long trailer rides that only add stress to their lives. While stress is a natural state of the body, too much stress is damaging to a horse’s health.
Over the next eight weeks, this series will discuss how the health of horses is negatively affected while they’re on the road, and what you, as a concerned owner, can do about it.
The key to horse care on the road is reducing your horse’s stress.
“Stress is good on the plains of Africa if you’re running from a lion, but I can’t think of any other reason stress would be good for a horse,” said Scott Swerdlin, DVM, MRCVS, of Palm Beach Equine Medical Centers in Wellington, Fla. “You want to do everything you can to decrease stress.”
What Is Stress?
Stress is a natural response of the body to something that threatens it, physically or mentally, accident or disease. Since horses are prey animals, stress triggers their natural “fight or flight” response. In many situations, however, a horse doesn’t have the ability for “flight” when stressed, and stress continues to build.
When a horse is anxious or scared, his heart rate and blood pressure go up, and circulation to the gut, skin and other body parts decreases, allowing the blood to flow primarily to the muscles and lungs. This change prepares the horse’s body to get away quickly. A stressed horse also has increased retention of sodium and water and a reduction in tissue inflammation.
Chemically, stress produces an increase in the adrenal glands’ production of cortisol. Cortisol is regularly present in the body and helps regulate metabolism, blood pressure, immune function and inflammatory response. However, too much cortisol can significantly impact your horse.
“Corticosteroids have good effects and bad effects,” said Swerdlin. “The bad effects can sometimes overcome the good effects. In some cases, like in older horses, they can develop problems from profuse diarrhea to laminitis.”
The Cortisol Conundrum
The Good (Temporary Stress)
