by Marcella Gruchalak

Horse shopping is stressful, especially when you don’t bring home the horse you thought you bought.

Horse shopping is an extremely stressful and overwhelming situation. Looking for a horse that’s the perfect fit takes time and plenty of searching. You browse multiple search engines such as Facebook, Google and Craigslist, scanning hundreds of ads daily. Finally, you narrow it down to which horses you’d like to visit. The horses you’ve picked out have a description meeting your qualifications and their videos show healthy, sound moving, sane minded animals.

Regardless of the well written ad, high quality videos and pleasant phone conversation with the current owner, once you’re on site ready to meet and ride the horse, there can be multiple red flags that indicate this horse isn’t what’s advertised.

1. Upon arrival the horse is sweaty. If the horse you’re going to see is sweaty, especially in the area where the saddle sits, this is a good indicator that the horse has been worked before you arrived. The horse may be high energy and the owner may have worked her beforehand to guarantee you a more pleasant ride.

This situation may be the most difficult to bridle (pun intended). Two ways to grapple with this circumstance are to be frank and ask why the horse has sweat marks or to arrive early to prevent it from happening.

Read more: 5 Red Flags You Should Not Ignore When Horse Shopping (And How to Address Them)

by Juliet M. Getty, Ph.D.

We know they’re out there. Horses who are enjoying life. Horses who are brimming with health – strong muscles, shiny coats, hard hooves, good digestion, normal metabolism, strong immune function – just plain healthy! How does this happen? What is it about their care and feeding that gives them such wellbeing?

We’re always searching for answers. Our typical approach is to study sick horses. But that only helps us to understand disease. We look at fat horses to understand fat horses. We look at horses with pain, metabolic problems, and digestive ailments to understand those who are experiencing the same hardships. While such research is worthwhile, wouldn’t it also make sense to evaluate fit, hearty horses so we can strive to make our own horses be more like them? Shouldn’t we be looking at what healthy horses experience?

Here’s the basic “recipe” for a healthy horse:

Avoid feeding excess calories. Obesity is a real problem and it comes from piling on the calories, combined with lack of physical activity. Forage should be the dietary staple and it should flow steadily throughout the horse’s entire gastrointestinal tract. Pounds and pounds of concentrated feeds can shorten a horse’s life.

Read more: The Secret to Healthy Horses? Keep it Simple!

by Jen Roytz

Biosecurity should be a year-round concern for any farm, equine competition venue or other location in which horses are kept, but recent outbreaks of communicable diseases around the world have horsemen on heightened alert.

More recently, an outbreak of equine influenza in an active training yard prompted the cancellation of racing at tracks throughout Britain. More locally, nine horses have now been confirmed positive for equine influenza after being stabled at the World Equestrian Center, an equestrian competition venue in Columbus, Ohio. Several other horses who had recently competed at the facility were diagnosed with the virus once they returned to their home base in Indiana.

Read more: Horse Health: Equine Influenza and How to Minimize Your Risk

Dr. Amy Gill, PhD Equine Nutritionist

Hot, dry weather is on the rise across the country and will continue throughout the summer months. This type of environment poses challenges for horse owners in keeping their horses healthy and comfortable. Keeping horses hydrated and cool are of paramount importance during hot, dry weather.

Water is needed by the horse for body fluid balance, digestive function and thermoregulation. Lack of water is more rapidly fatal than lack of feed. Therefore, utmost attention should be paid to water quality and availability particularly when the ambient temperature remains high for long periods of time. Here are tips and suggestions for making sure your horse stays hydrated:

• Be sure to aggressively treat any horse with diarrhea and do not leave a sick horse out in direct sunlight.

• Be sure the water available is cool, preferably in the shade or under shelter. Water out in direct sunlight will become hot very quickly and be intolerable to the horse; change the water several times daily if it is heating up. Keep an eye on herd dynamics around a water source to make sure everyone is getting a drink. If the water trough is being dominated by one horse, be sure to make additional water sources available.

• Feed free choice forage (hay, hay cubes or pelleted forages) to encourage drinking. Water intake is directly related to how much dry matter is consumed. Eating forage triggers the thirst response because it absorbs water from the intestinal tract.

Read more: Managing Horses in Hot Weather

Eleanor M. Kellon, VMD

Everyone has heard about the ketogenic diet by now, or "keto" for short. It is basically a reinvention of the Atkins diet with more emphasis on eating fat. Fasting, starvation, and no or low, simple carbohydrate diets trigger a higher rate of fat oxidation to spare glucose. In omnivores and dogs, a by-product of fat oxidation is the production of ketones — hence the name.

The best diet for EMS horses is similar to ketogenic in that simple carbohydrate intake is very low. However, carb and fat calories are replaced by fiber calories. That very basic fact of equine nutrition and physiology is ignored by a proposal to treat EMS with a ketogenic diet.

Read more: Ketogenic Diet for Horses? Pass

Even mild dehydration can have an effect on performance. Once you know the basics, it's not that difficult to supplement electrolytes correctly, but many people don't know how - and the consequences may be taking more of a toll than is realized.

Electrolytes are minerals that exist in the body in their free, ionized form - i.e. carrying an electrical charge. Cations like calcium, potassium and sodium have positive charges. Anions like chloride, bicarbonate and sulfate are negative.

Movement of electrolytes makes excitatory activity possible, such as muscles contracting, nerves firing and the heart beating. Electrolyte concentrations and gradients also allow the body to hold normal amounts of water (hydration) and the kidneys to adjust the concentration of urine.

Sweat is a major avenue of loss for sodium, potassium, chloride and to a lesser extent calcium and magnesium, but it's not the only avenue.

Read more: The Right Way to Dose Electrolytes

by: Joyce Harman, DVM

Muzzles are often accused of damaging the horse’s front teeth. This can be true, but it's important to put it in the correct context. A grazing muzzle prevents a horse from overeating grass, which can save her life, or at least save the horse a bad case of laminitis and the owner thousands of dollars in veterinarian bills. However, as with everything in life, a bit of knowledge and common sense will make wearing a muzzle much less damaging. Horses that crib or run their teeth on bars in the stall often wear their teeth much more than what occurs with a muzzle, yet muzzles get the blame for tooth damage.

Read more: Muzzle Adjustments May Prevent Teeth Damage

by Dressage Rider Training

In this article, I will run through rider back stretches and hip mobility work to help release lower back and hip pain in riders.

The human body has this amazing ability to heal itself. At any age and in nearly any state especially when given the right environment to do so. Our body will put up with a huge amount of silly movement and poor lifestyle choices for a long time because we have a large amount of functional tolerance built into us.

However we shouldn’t abuse this high tolerance and instead, we should ensure we listen and take care of our body on a daily basis. Because those little signs and symptoms that do appear can turn into bigger uglier problems later on if not taken care of. Just as a tree moulds to its environment over the years from the different weather patterns, so too does our body.

So if that environment is creating niggles and imbalances, which you ignore and only fix the symptoms, it could continue to be an issue for much longer. So given that we have this amazing body that can repair and heal itself with the right tools and environment it makes sense that we would want to pay attention to both areas when aiming to improve our rider wellbeing.

These rider back stretches and exercises are designed to help relieve lower back or hip pain, which is an incredibly common problem and often created because of the environment our bodies are placed in each and every day. So as much you want to do these stretches, pay attention to other possible changes you can make to your daily life. Such as when we sit this can be for long durations at a time and this can cause tightness in our hamstrings, shoulders, hip flexors, and compression in our lower back. To combat this, consider adding in more standing and walking into your day. Try this, for every 30 minutes of sitting you do per day, aim to do 2 minutes of walking or aim to spend 50% of your day on your feet, be it with a stand-up desk or walking meetings.

Read more: 12 Stretches to Release Lower Back and Hip Pain In Riders