Rethinking Everything We Know About Feeding Horses - Stephanie Carter FNTP

So why don’t we kick things off by having you tell the listeners who you are and what it is you do? Sure. So my name is Stephanie Carter and I am a functional nutrition therapy practitioner who specializes in horses. I have been a veterinary technician for my a little over 20 years now. I’ve been 23 and I’ve worked in everything from small animals, primarily large animal, a little bit mixed animal practice all up and down the East Coast basically.

Most recently I was the case manager and on staff nutritionist for a holistic vet in Marshall, VA. But I am now out on my own and my consulting practice is Indigo Ancestral Health and I focus on Equine functional nutrition. Excellent. So you actually just launched a book? I did.

So what? Why would someone be interested in reading your book? So my book is written to be another lens to look through as far as how we approach our horses long term health. So a lot of the clients that I work with on a regular basis are extremely complex cases who have kind of done a little bit of everything, if not all the things that are conventionally recognized. And they’re not giving us for or anywhere at all with any of the other modalities.

And by paying close attention to the way our horses evolved not only to eat, but the way they move socialization, you know, the way that they are meant to handle stress and how the things we’re feeding and doing and the ways we keep them might be affecting their health. I think looking at it from a more functional perspective gives us a lot of answers that maybe we didn’t consider before. And in my practice at least, taking that sort of whole horse approach really gets us better, more long term results not only more quickly but more permanently than most of the conventional sort of agricultural based protocols seem to render. Yeah. So I guess when you’re talking about functional nutrition, how does that differ from what we would consider regular nutrition?

So functional nutrition is looking at it. It’s a sect of functional medicine, and that word functional is kind of a buzzword in human health right now. So we’re probably familiar with it a little bit at least from that aspect and it translates to the animals as well as far as the concept. So in a functional medicine, the we’re looking for the root cause of why, whether it’s a human and a horse, dog, cat, what have you. We’re looking for the reason why that being has the symptoms that it has because symptoms aren’t actually the problem.

They’re the message from the body of what is actually compromised and not functioning like it should. And we’re addressing the root cause rather than putting a Band-Aid on the system or the symptoms. I’m sorry. And we’re looking at the being, in this case, horses as a whole, meaning we’re not breaking it down into one organ or one problem. We’re looking at how the system is functioning as a whole and how to support that.

And when we do that, a lot of times we can make the disease process, symptoms, whatever descriptor you want to use there, go away and not just go away, but be resolved. So we can do a lot of healing by addressing root cause versus just putting band aids just suppress the symptom. And in functional nutrition, we’re using food to do that. So we use food to heal. Interesting.

Yeah, it so I feel like. So you and I spoke a couple of years ago and when we were chatting we were kind of talking about metabolic diseases and all of that stuff, Cushings and just horses with really poor metabolic flexibility. And I had found your work because I had a horse that had been diagnosed with Cushings and sweet itch and she had just a bunch of stuff. And I had found that kind of taking away all of the processed feed really helped her out a lot. And I feel like in that time, the 2 1/2 years it’s been since we’ve chatted, every stinking horse now is diagnosed with some type of metabolic issue.

Absolutely. And, and we’re not even talking, you know, I come from the performance space. We’re talking fit animals that are not just ponies, not just draft crosses. What do you think is contributing to this sort of uptick in horses being diagnosed with these metabolic issues? So I don’t think that while it would be lovely for us to just point our fingers at one specific thing, I don’t think that we can point necessarily at one specific thing.

I think there’s a lot of factors that go into it because like I said, from my perspective, we have to take into account not only diet, but lifestyle, you know, management, environmental type conditions as well. But I do think that the most significant contributing factor and the one that we also have the most control over is the diet. And you know, where I differ from a lot of the conventionally educated nutrition professionals is that I’m not just looking at things like a guaranteed analysis because and a feed bag can have an extremely impressive guaranteed analysis, but still promote inflammation and sickness. So for me, before I ever even look at the guaranteed analysis, I don’t care what’s there until I look at the ingredients list. And you would be shocked to find that the vast majority of the things that are included in most of the mainstream feeds are things that contribute to inflammatory burden, whether it’s the ingredient itself, the way that it is manufactured or processed, or the way that it’s grown.

In my new book, I actually have a list of what I call the Won’t Thrive 25 and the functional 15 and the Won’t Thrive 25 are is a list of the top 25 ingredients we see most commonly in horse feeds that are what I would call dirty and would be contributing to that decline in health. And then the functional 15 that supports Physiology of the horse. So I think that’s something that most horse owners don’t think about is what are we actually feeding? The guaranteed analysis might say that it is the perfect amount of, you know, protein, fat, carbohydrate, etcetera. But what is making that up and how do those ingredients affect the way the horse evolved to eat?

And I think we’ve strayed further in the last 150 years from what they evolved to eat. Then they we’ve basically imposed on them more changes in 150 years than they went through evolutionarily speaking in 22,000,000 years. So I do think that’s a huge factor in why they’re all arguably sicker than they ever have been. Yeah, it there’s there’s this funny thing going on right now to where we had a horse. So personally, my mayor got diagnosed with Cushings, but she with they, they just took her ACTH and it came back elevated and they told me to start treating her for Cushings.

And luckily she had a really bad reaction to the percent. So I, I ended up doing a little bit more digging and we ended up being like, she actually doesn’t need to be treated for Cushing. She needs to be kind of hormonally and metabolically managed a little bit better. And so that was that was kind of her journey with that. But to me, I got there from just a bad reaction to the drug.

Not necessarily through more blood work and and all of that, but I have seen an uptick now in horses who were diagnosed with Cushing’s, put on a drug for it. And then when they were actually tested for Cushing’s, they were told they did not have it. But so then the vets take them off the drug. But we’re never addressing this elevated ACTH that got them the diagnosis in the 1st place. What would cause elevated ACTH but not necessarily have it be Cushing’s yet.

So I think the best way to sort of present that for listeners is just to sort of talk about a case that I saw here in Virginia in collaboration with the meth that I used to work for. Because this was a four year old Pacifino mayor who was stalled 24 hours a day, seven days a week, never got any turn out. She got a before we started working on her, she got a flake of pay twice a day and the equivalent of basically like 1/2 a cup of the run-of-the-mill ration balancer twice a day. And the only time she was ever taken out of her stall was to be worked. And I would question the methods of the particular trainer in that.

I don’t think that they were the kindest, clearest or most horse first friendly. So this mayor presented with having EMS, which included elevated insulin and an elevated ACTH standing ACTH. She was bloated all over, had fat pads. She’d come out of the stall wide eyed, you know, agency white rings at the edge of her eyes. And it ended up being that it was the culmination of all of the things happening in her life.

But she’s four years old. OK, room. I’m just reminding everybody that this horse was four years old and it was the chronic stress of never beating it to move being what I would call abused in training said inappropriately with restricted calories and she desperately needed somebody work. And so between diet and some osteopathy, the vet that was on the case and I were able to not only bring her out of having this elevated ACTH and insulin in 2-3 weeks time. I don’t even think it was, might not have even been that long, but we managed to make a little bit of a change in how all of the horses at that particular farm were managed because they were all heading in that direction.

So I don’t know how far down this rabbit hole you want me to go, but we can talk about endocrine function and why chronic stress effects endocrine system. But that’s a little bit of a technical conversation. So I don’t know if you want me to go there or not. Yeah. You know, I don’t know if there’s like not necessarily ATLDR, but like an overview of maybe how one, what is the endocrine system and maybe how stress does communicate with it and.

So when I talk about the endocrine system in horses, I’m primarily thinking about what’s called the HPA access. And HPA is the acronym for hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenals. The thyroid is kind of in there, but it’s secondary. So we don’t talk about that so much, but so that the hypothalamus and the pituitary are glands within the brain. Most horse people are very familiar with pituitary because that’s what we associate with Cushing’s and that elevated ACTH doesn’t get discussed very often are the adrenal glands in that conversation.

So in an extremely healthy horse who or not even extremely healthy horse, but a horse who has not yet developed any kind of metabolic condition, those 3 glands, the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenals does. They communicate to each other in a constant feedback loop of the hormones they’re responsible for producing. And when one of those elements or glands is fatigued or not functioning as optimally as it should be, it then causes stress on the rest of the glands in that system. And it makes that whichever glands are trying to stimulate the one that’s not working. For example, if your adrenal glands get fatigued, then hypothalamus and pituitary, particularly the pituitary, end up producing more of the hormone it’s responsible for to stimulate the adrenals to put out the hormone that it’s responsible for, primarily cortisol, to continue that feedback loop.

So when we talk about chronic stress in a horse, chronic stress, whether the horse exhibits it outwardly or not, causes an elevation in cortisol. And an elevated cortisol can actually be the underlying catalyst for elevated insulin. They go kind of hand in hand, OK. And if the horse goes long enough in a state of fight, flight, or even fawn and freeze, the cortisol might be pumping, pumping, pumping. But eventually those adrenals get so tired they can’t keep up with the demand of production for the cortisol.

So then that adrenals are compromised and stop producing like they should be. Which then causes, like we just discussed, the pituitary in particular, to scream at the adrenals to pick up the slack and try to stimulate the adrenals to do what they’re supposed to do by putting out more ACTH. But the adrenals just can’t because they’re too stressed or they’ve gotten to a point it’s fatigue. So that’s where that chronic stress piece comes into a metabolic conversation. And I know that was long.

I apologize. I hope everybody kept those. No, that was great. And you know, I think it’s so interesting because a lot of these words are buzzwords today, right? Like cortisol.

I think everyone knows what cortisol is, but I don’t know how many people associate cortisol with a raised insulin, you know, which really brings into question, I’ve been having this conversation a lot about incentive structures and the horse world has just gotten off on the wrong. We took the wrong exit on the incentive highway and where so much of horse keeping today is sort of managing all of these things that we’ve done to the horses. And by the way of the way we manage them, right? Yes. And, you know, it’s like the horse, the horse being kept in the stall, You know, it’s like, even if you’re not purposefully right, your horse gets injured and you need to keep them on stall rest.

It’s there are just like all of these things that we don’t even take into consideration. You know, I never once have thought my horse is going on stall rest. I wonder if this is going to spike his insulin, you know, And so I think thinking about it in terms of, oh, you’re dealing with like a whole being, You know, you’re not just treating the leg right, You’re treating this whole internal and external being. And to think about how all of these things connect it. I just think it’s so fascinating.

But it reminded me that I think in our last chat, I think it was you that we spoke about horses being skinny fat. And you know, I’m, I’m sitting here listening to the you chat about that horse. And, and then I get nervous about easy keeper horses who were told to limit the hay and limit the grass and, and limit all of these things. But then we’re probably just actually feeding into this stress that we’re creating from limiting the amount of grazing and then, yeah, we’re not really ever getting ahead of the problem. So how would you suggest people relatively broadly speaking, think about caring for the more easy keeper type horses?

Well, I guess we should start that conversation with, as far as I’m concerned, equine obesity and or most metabolic conditions are a result of a lack of movement or are a symptom of confinement. Maybe that’s a better way of putting this because horses naturally have evolved and have always until they were domesticated, they used to traverse somewhere around 17 miles a day foraging so. They are meant to do lots of low impact movements and that’s why we don’t tend to see these problems in the wild populations because they get to do all of that, you know, natural movement and foraging on a regular basis. Horses are meant to essentially be foraging or grazing for 18 to 21 hours out of the day and we actually can induce insulin resistance and or stress internalized stress with that cortisol being elevated by restricting the intake of forage and it’s a subconscious thing for them. It’s actually something that occurs naturally in the wild in like fall, early winter, when things because start becoming scarce.

It actually triggers the horse’s body to slow down metabolically and hold on to pretty much everything that they consume. So good, bad or indifferent. Yeah, because they’d starve to death over the winter if they did. When food becomes scarce. So when we create that false scarcity by restricting the forage, in particular for these forces that are quote UN quote, easy keepers, we’re actually setting them up to potentially develop something like insulin resistance or exacerbating an existing diagnosis of insulin resistance, which as far as I’m concerned is completely reversible.

But it’s like our number one worst mistake. And I know that there are people that it will be out there that are probably screaming at the podcast, but my horse never has an off switch. Well, that’s probably because your horse has a liver problems, which is for us, insulin resistant. That’s what I find anyway. They’re usually pretty deficient and then they also don’t have an off switch and they inhale one because they don’t.

They’re not accustomed to having access to forage 24/7. But if you allow that to happen, they may gobble a lot in the beginning. But it’s because they’ve been conditioned to think that at some point there isn’t going to be any. So they have to eat as much as they can while it’s there. If you need them to eat as much as they want, they eventually will start to self regulate unless you have some practitioners will call it fatty liver disease, I just call it liver stagnation.

And the liver needs extra support. And if you can do that and allow them to free choice, they will feed on hay, they will original. They will eventually get to a point where they self regulate. And I think that that’s what we make the biggest mistake with with our quote UN quote, easy keepers is that we’re not feeding them the way they’re sorry metabolism is supposed to function. And we also start to think that they have to have meals and they don’t necessarily have to have meals as long as they’re getting hay and the vitamins and minerals that they require.

And that’s probably another topic to discuss briefly, but if they’re getting the vitamins and minerals that they require, they don’t necessarily have to have a meal like grain or some sort of ration balance or is, you know what everybody’s calling it now. So I think that’s where we get off on the wrong foot with the metabolic horses or the easy keeper types. Yeah, it’s interesting because I had this horse and I think he maybe was one of the reasons I was asking about if horses can be skinny fat because he, you know, we got him, he’s like 16 two, we got him as a four year old and he was gangly and I don’t own him. He he’s just one of my clients horses and she keeps him at home and they were throwing grain at this horse like you would not believe it. And he was not gaining any weight and you know, they but like the thing about him was he was duper impulsive.

So like he could not walk past a blade of grass without trying to snap for it. He could not, and it it wasn’t like naughty pony screw you, I’m going to stop here and eat the grass. It was like frantic. Yeah. And I, they luckily ended up getting a lot of that sorted out, but I never once felt I kind of figured he was getting hyped up on the feed and that was kind of getting cracked out And that’s why he would like seafood and be like food must get it.

But I never once thought of, you know, and this is a show course. So he’s not living in a large pasture with a bunch of buddies. Like he has a stall, he has a day paddock and then he gets like night turn out. And so it really would make sense that this impulsion actually stems from this like lack of it. It’s like an addict, right?

Like they’re, they’re lacking or trying to like fulfill this thing. And so, but when they feel like it’s restricted, they almost gravitate more towards. It right? And that to me is like that same psychological response that the addict doesn’t know that they’re doing this because of human evolution, right? Like the same way the horse doesn’t know, oh, I’m supposed to be eating for 21 hours a day.

And the you know that they just go, oh, food crab is it? Well, they do have what I call innate wisdom. They do know what they needed, but we just as a population as a whole of equestrians have kind of moved so far away from it that we shut it off in them. Not completely, but more than anything, the way I usually like to describe it is if you’ve never, if you’ve ever known someone who went from eating like your standard American diet, which is very highly processed seed oils, horrible processed things. They and then they start doing like a keto or paleo type diet.

We see them lose a lot of what appears to be weight, but it’s actually inflammation. And it’s shocking how much when they go to like that Paleo diet, because the food is so nutrient dense and because the body has been so deprived of actual nutrition for so long that it’s shocking how much food that’s Paleo or those people can consume and still lose again what we see as weight. And they actually do that in the beginning. They kind of gorge themselves because they, their body actually starts to realize that, Oh my gosh, I’m so deficient and this is real food. And Oh my gosh, I have to fix myself.

And the horses have that same sort of innate wisdom that gets turned back on when you eliminate the highly processed seeds that, contrary to popular belief, are not actually contributing to health. Or they may be preventing gross deficiencies, but they’re not actually helping the horses thrive. Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of like that the people who eat these highly processed diets, even though some of them may be obese, they’re actually super nutrient deficient. So they’re like starving, but they’re eating, which is what a lot of people think actually contributes to the the weight gain, is that your body is seeking out these nutrients and they’re but the only thing they have are pop tarts. So they’re they just grab another pop tart and but so maybe let’s chat a little bit about bioavailability because I think people just assume, OK, this large feed company is selling me this product saying that my horse is going to get all of this stuff.

And all of that stuff may technically be in there, but the horse isn’t getting or absorbing all of it. So I think there’s a lot of factors that go into absorption and bioavailability beyond the actual bioavailability of or nutrient density of the feed ingredient, whatever it may be itself. And it’s hard because what we don’t ever consider about horses in general is what is the status of their microbiome and how have we made it potentially imbalanced or unhealthy? So the horses that I most commonly see with microbiome issues, and if you’re not familiar with the term microbiome, that’s the bacteria in the gut that does all of the digesting for your horse. So if your horse doesn’t have the right balance of bacteria in their gut, they cannot digest.

If we’ve ever used antibiotics, if we’re feeding, you know, a lot of those mainstream kind of green byproduct wastes, we’re feeding the wrong one where either knocking out beneficial bacteria with antibiotics or something of the like, or we’re feeding the wrong bacteria by feeding inappropriate feed ingredients. And so the microbiome can be skewed too far in either a detrimental harmful bacteria population or a very healthy one depending on what you’re feeding and then everywhere in between. So I think it’s important to think about is my horses microbiome healthy enough to digest even the best diet that I give it because that does contribute to the bioavailability and how the horse breaks down the food and absorbs it. But we also have to look at what ingredients are again are in your feed. So if we’re feeding synthetic vitamins and minerals, those are not nearly as bioavailable as natural.

If you’re feeding, you know, like soy holes and wheat meddlings and other things that I joke are things that got swept off the feed room floor. They don’t have a whole lot of nutrient density to them. And all they’re really doing is contributing to that inflammatory burden and the bacterial imbalance within the gut that then makes everything else that maybe isn’t as bad in whatever feed you’re giving that it. The bacteria can’t do anything with it because it’s skewed toward the bacteria that it only feed on the unhealthy things. So I am a huge proponent of what I call a species appropriate nutrient dense real foods diet, or at least as close to, you know, real Whole Foods as you can get.

And that essentially means forage. First, I don’t actually feed too many grains at all, if at all really. And people often think that horses can’t thrive who are performance horses on a forage first or forage based approach. But that’s not true at all. I have Olympic level horses that eat no grains and only forage.

And, you know, they’re bio individualized minerals and they compete at some of the top levels of sport. So that’s what horses were meant to be eating because again, we talked about, you know, how horses were meant to be grazing and foraging and eating small amounts of vegetation 18 to 21 hours of out of the day. And I know I think I kind of got also fabric there with bioavailability. But when the horses are eating things that they evolved to consume, you are automatically going to get more nutrition from those things then you would the items that they are not. So horses are not, they don’t have a gallbladder.

They’re not meant to eat copious amounts of fat. They don’t process copious amount copious amounts of fat extremely well. They can kind of adapt, but not entirely. And then you run into issues with microbiome population being inappropriate. They are not meant to eat much starch at all, just across the board because again, that’s not what they were meant to eat.

It can cause high gut acidosis and an imbalance of microbiome. So really we have to approach bioavailability and feeding our horses for the perspective of, OK, what were they meant to eat? What are we not feeding that they were meant to eat? Yeah. So it’s interesting, right, Because we’re kind of horse sport is such an interesting thing because there’s no like formal education, like unless you did Pony Club or 4H, there’s not really like a broader sense.

You kind of just grow up in a barn and you see the way your trainer does things and you go, OK, this is just how things are done. And then maybe you go and work for another person and you go, OK, I like how they do this better and you create your own sort of of way of doing things with the horses. But even Pony Club doesn’t necessarily talk about a species appropriate diet, right? Like it lets you, you need to know the proteins, fats and carbohydrate ratios and stuff, but it doesn’t say, hey, these aren’t really real food. And this is really real food.

And so it’s sometimes I feel like it can be overwhelming to be someone who maybe doesn’t know a lot about, one, nutrition and two, even what like horses as a species are supposed to be eating, you know, like, you know, they’re supposed to eat hay, but you go, is that it? Where do they get the hay in the wild? And, and, you know, like all of this stuff. So for what? When you so you say forage should be the base of the diet.

What where are we starting with that? Is there like, oh, OK, if you just have an easy keeper feed Timothy hay or a teff hay or a coastal, like where do you sort of start with, OK, this is step one. Like how many flakes of hay in a hay net, not in a hay net, you know, like what are your sort of basics, I guess of feeding so. If we’re making blanket statements, which is hard for me to do because I also come from a perspective of every course is a bio individual, so we can’t make blanket statements on what they need. I don’t even believe in complete feeds because I don’t think that it’s possible to make a feed that meets the requirement of every horse at a.

We make seeds based on population level values, but the horse is a bio individual. Just like every human cannot eat the same way, Every horse, every dog, every cat, none. None of us can eat the same way and we all end up requiring different things. But if we are making blanket statements about what is the cornerstone, where do you start? I usually recommend that the cornerstone of your feed program should be, when appropriate, access to pasture.

Obviously if you have a horse that has an elevated insulin, you have to get the insulin under control first. But don’t let anybody tell you they can’t go back out to graze eventually if the insulin is well managed because insulin resistance is reversible. But when appropriate, you should have access to pasture and hay. So those are forage. Both pasture and hay are forage at all times, 24/7, 365, never running out.

Then from there that should be the bulk of their caloric intake. But from there, as far as like a meal goes, I just use like a forage pellet, whether that’s Timothy, Tess, orchard, same Foin, whatever. You can get your hands on the forage pellet and anti-inflammatory fat, like a cool stance or something along those lines. And then I rounded out with a high quality vitamin mineral. And when I say high quality vitamin mineral, the vitamins and minerals that are either essentially you want a vitamin mineral that has very, very few if any at all synthetic vitamins or minerals in it.

So you want like a chelated or amino acid bound type vitamin mineral and that’s your basic diet. It does not have to be complicated almost. Horses will thrive on that for as much as the average amateur owner requires. There are cases obviously, when a horse has a muscle disorder, for example, like PSSM 2 or you’re dealing with a metabolic condition or you know, Lyme disease, things like that, that you have to use different herbs and things to sort of combat or support what those particular horses need. But that’s the basis.

Pasture, hay, forage, pellet, little bit of healthy fat and then a high quality vitamin mineral. And that’s really all they should need nutritionally. But then you also have to take into account that they need to have friends. They need to have turn out, they need to have time to decompress. They are sentient beings and they they do hold on to emotions much in the same way people do.

They have trauma and they’re a lot more likely to let that go if you work on allowing them to let that go. But it can manifest if they feel shut down and like they’re not safe to have a voice. And when I say a voice, just, you know, expression, when they don’t feel safe to have a voice, they’ll shut down and then their body keeps the score. And eventually those traumas can manifest as physical symptoms or processes. So it’s while we control a lot with the diet, I think equally as important with the diet is making sure that as much as we possibly can, we are trying to mimic what the horses needed in or had in the wild.

We can’t ever return them to the environments that they had before or the lifestyles that they had before, but we can do much better than we are right now. Yeah, you mean I couldn’t just like let my horse into the wild and they couldn’t survive? I have one that maybe can make it, but the rest aren’t doing too good. A. Few thoroughbreds that might not be.

It’s actually funny because I had two thoroughbreds get out of their pasture yesterday morning and like busted through the gate before feeding and I like walk out of the door of my house and like they’re in my front yard. And I was like, at least you guys stayed local, you know, the their paddocks like 700 meters away. And I’m like, you know, they’re these two are pretty domesticated. Yes. And they had their buddy that they could go on an adventure with.

But but yeah, I think, you know, I think there is a lot more chat about letting horses be horses as much as possible. It is so tricky. Again, I’m an inventor and I feel like inventors have always been a little bit more on the, it’s a horse side than some of the other disciplines. But I’ve also never been in a situation, you know, I’ve said this before where my horse is worth millions of dollars. So like, I, I don’t even know what I would do as a horse owner in that situation.

I think the more people understand just what allows them to be healthier in the long run, you know, you’re actually saving money on vet bills and you’re saving money on, on a lot of these things and. Prevention. Yeah, it’s all about prevention rather than waiting for something to go wrong, you know, And I think that is we unfortunately have gotten to that point where we just expect that at some point that’s going to be part of our horse ownership is they’re going to have a metabolic disease and they’re going to get an injury or they’re going to this, that and the other thing, you know, soft tissue injury or something. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. We shouldn’t just expect and wait for it to happen because we actually have the tools to prevent breakdown.

However, you wanted to find breakdown. Yeah, no, I mean, it’s I, I had this client who bought, she buys babies and she bought a yearling and this thing showed up and it was like so over at the knee, you would not believe it. Like so over at the knee and you know, she goes, Oh my God, what did I buy? She jumps and I was like, honestly, I was like, turn her out in a big field, let her grow up. And the more we can do with bodywork and correct biomechanically correct training like this first will be fine.

And she’s just turning 5 and her legs are totally normal. But I think so much of it is you take them from not that, you know, in the United States, I feel like a lot of the breeding farms do have big fields that the babies can just like be babies in. But this horse was from like super northern Canada and it was bring so like she they just didn’t have the ability to like be turned out, you know, and so I think just being out and being a horse just yield her body. Yeah. You know, like all The Walking.

What do they say? Motion is lotion. It is so true. You know, they, they say when our when our horses colicking, which that’s another thing that like when you’re feeding a lot of good forage and your horses are out and they’re moving a lot, you actually deal with colic way less. Yeah.

And you know that to me, I grew up in a boarding stables in New Hampshire. So again, we had seasonal difficulties with turn out. The horses weren’t always turned out as they were turned out as often as possible. But like, there are some mornings where you get 6 feet of snow and you’re like, right, damn, we’re lucky that we can like get in here to feed today. And, you know, that’s just the reality of owning horses in places like relatively metropolitan New Hampshire.

But I totally lost my train of thought. But just overall, the more we can let them be horses, the healthier we’re all going to be because we’re not sitting there worrying about when is my next bill going to be? Can I afford colic surgery? Can I? And it’s not saying that that definitely won’t happen, but it just decreases with the friends and the the pasture and the movement and the forage.

And I think it can sound, I can only imagine I pay like $16.00 a bail for Timothy hay down here in South Carolina. So like it sounds expensive, but then I go bull a colic surgery is $25,000 or whatever. So if I. Prefer off. If I can do some preventative whatever, I think that’s at least worth it to give it a shot.

Yeah. And I think the people that this conversation touches the most are the ones who really, and this isn’t to say that people who don’t necessarily accept this message or compete at a high level or are buying and selling or importing, you know, horses don’t love the horses. But I think what this is, who this will resonate with most are the people who love their horse and prioritize the connection with that horse over everything else. And I think that there are the biggest struggle in the equestrian world as a whole right now is that in general, regardless of what sport we’re talking about or what discipline we’re talking about, we all are so steeped in tradition and what we’ve always done. And that’s just how we do it.

And I, I think the reason that, and this doesn’t is just popped in my head as you were talking about, you know, all of the prevention and things, but it reminded me that there’s a lot of pushback against the things that we’re talking about. And I think that’s why is because people are so reluctant to let go of the tradition with an equestrian sports that it it almost threatens their identity. And so I think this whole conversation that we’re having is going to resonate with the people who are very much connection first, horse first, sport last. And I guess anybody that’s listening that feels like the whole world is against them for advocating for their horse, just know that there is a huge movement happening right now. Equine welfare is happening across the globe on all levels, from veterinary medicine to nutrition to training to just every corner of anything that you can figure for horses.

The movement is happening and the people that are fighting it are going to fight till the bitter end. But eventually, I think everyone’s going to realize just how wrong we’ve been for so long. And that’s not that we failed their horses. It doesn’t, you know, mean that you’re a terrible horse person. It just means we learned right and and now that we know better, we can do better.

So don’t give up if you’re there ahead of your barn manager or the people that you ride with or even your vet. Don’t give up just because you got somewhere first. Just keep advocating for your horse and keep keep doing what you know is right for your horse. And eventually, I think the industry as a whole will catch up. And there are a lot of us who are kind of being the Joan of Arc of this movement and putting ourselves up front to be burned at the stake.

So sorry. So that the movement keeps going forward. But yeah, I think, I think the industry as a whole is shifting and we’ll get there. Yeah, no, I mean, I just wrote a blog on this exact topic and it’s, I think the shift that we’re seeing is people who genuinely love horses, you know, like I love horses. I still have all of the horses who have gotten me anywhere in this life.

You know, I, if I can’t afford to retire them, I can’t afford to have them. I, they’re a part of my family. And but there’s a lot of people who will say they love their horses and then turn around and be like, but I do this and this for them. So they should turn around to win the competition for me. And, and I think that we’re just starting to see those people get weeded out of it.

And you know, the as much as I mean, I’m, I’m not a huge social media lover, rice whiz. I think the best part about it is it gives people an opportunity to say, you know, when they have that gut feeling of I don’t know that I’m doing right by my horse or I don’t know that my vet is right about this or I don’t know. It’s not that these people in the industry go out to like, you know, make wrong diagnosis or. Bad decisions or are exactly. They don’t go out there to do it.

It’s just again, going back to that. We got off the wrong exit in our incentive structure highway and a lot of us can feel in our bones the right direction that the the horse industry as a whole needs to move. Towards. And it’s but there are just people that are so indoctrinated and yeah, identify so hard with how it is that that they’re and it’s not that they don’t want to learn, they just don’t even know that there’s additional stuff out there. And then when they get presented to it, it invokes that that flight or fight response.

And social media gives a lot of people the power to verbally fight. But I do think overall everything sport, the industry, there are so many people advocating for horses now that we’re really starting to move in the right direction. And I think the fact that you as a as a nutritionist can come on this podcast and be like, hey, yeah. So like, I, I feel like most of our conversation today was actually about treating horses like horses. And not necessarily, I mean, there definitely was some good teaching moments in there.

But I, I do feel like most of it was like these things are are beings that kind of need to live a certain way and. This. Food thing is part of it but like look at all of these other parts and then it. Really takes, yeah, it really takes all of those other parts. And it also is an example of how there isn’t a single modality, whether it’s nutrition, but men, farriers, anybody, there isn’t a single modality that’s going to solve every problem.

You really have to approach the horse in a collaborative way. And I think that in order for at least here in this country, we have such a crisis in vet Med right now with vet shortages and burnout and all of the things that we have to approach things from a collaborative perspective now where the vet isn’t the only go to person. One, because they honestly in a lot of areas don’t get the right education to be the expert. And two, they need to be available emotionally, mentally, physically for the things that they are supposed to be really good at diagnosing, treating emergencies, things like that. And everything else should be able to be passed off to the nutritionist, the farrier that and everybody should be able to cohesively collaborate.

But I think it fits with that conversation about the industry and how there are some that are so deeply rooted in things being their identity. We all have to learn and I think that in a very roundabout way, the horses are teaching us this. We have to learn not to let the ego or our our egos be what drives decisions, and we have to be more open to collaboration of all parties involved to do what ends up being best for the horse standing in front of us. Yeah, for sure. I, I always go back to, I remember I had this farrier and he was super talented and we got a horse in.

The horse got foot X-rays and just had a mess of feet. And the farrier said or the vet said we should do XY and Z board the horse. And the Ferrier said, no, we should do XY and Z for the horse. And it became such an issue that I basically stopped working with both of them because I was like, this is like, we need to work together to make this. I’m not right.

I can look at the outside of the foot and maybe the X-ray and be like, OK, I can kind of see what’s going on. But I can’t make a shoe and tack on a shoe and I can’t look at an X-ray and see all of the things that my vet can see. And it’s like, but also you all need to get along and be amenable. And, you know, because it is true that I think we as horse owners need to be very good at finding the people that specialize in the the kind of problem that we’re seeing. And for the most part that that who’s just your, your normal vet, they’re going to be great at giving the vaccines and giving you drug information and giving you a lot of stuff, but they maybe don’t know that your horse has fatty liver.

Right. Back to what you were talking about earlier, I’ve never even heard of a horse having fatty liver, right? Like, so to me, I could have a horse presenting with that and then I call my bet and my bet treats my horse for whatever. But it’s like, This is why being able to go and say, OK, maybe my horse’s coat isn’t that shiny. Maybe my horse, maybe there’s a nutrition problem.

I should go find a nutritionist or maybe this is a whatever. And but the vets also should say, Hey, maybe you need to go like find this thing in this area because I’m not it, you know, and, and it all takes all of us to say, Hey, I actually this is where my limit is. I’m happy to like refer you to whatever, but like, I think that you’d be better served here versus being like, Oh yeah, I’ll solve this problem even though I have no idea what’s going on. I think we have to make normalize that right, that I think it’s sort of instilled in vets all the way as early as vet school in that they have to have all the answers. And that’s just unrealistic.

Nobody has all the answers. And we need to take a little bit of a page out of the human side of things in that we have specialists for a reason, because we can’t all know everything about everything. And we’re all going to understand things better than other things. Like for example, I probably understand metabolic conditions better than a lot of people. And the vet that I used to work for is fantastic get, you know, doing things like finding lamenesses that are related to compensatory patterns, things like that.

Like I can’t, I get to tell you the horse is lame, isn’t it? I don’t know what it is or what to do about it necessarily. I keep put my hands on the horse and fix the problem, but she can so, and I don’t take offense to that. It’s I think just huge that we all, like I said, learn to not have to be right all the time and to approach every opportunity for collaboration as a learning experience because there’s always going to be someone else out there who knows more than you do. And if there isn’t, you’re, you’re standing in the wrong room if you’re the smartest person in the room, right?

So I, I think that’s as important. And I do think that as much as it’s hard for owners to hear, they need to take some responsibility, some accountability for their horse’s health and not make it the vets help problem all the time. You know, they, like I said, don’t have all the answers. And right now here in the States, we are facing a crisis. We, there are areas that don’t have any vets, let alone any large animal vets.

So you have to, you have to educate yourself. You have to do things for yourself because you may not always have the vet there when you think you need them to, to be there. They have to prioritize things like emergencies and. Other things that we can’t do for ourselves, you know, So, yeah, I think the owners need to be advocates and seek out information. They need to educate themselves on everything that they can do for their horse.

And that sounds daunting, but imagine being the vet or the nutritionist or whatever practitioner who has a practice full of, you know, like me, I have A Thousand Horses in my practice, if not bore by natural. But imagine being one person trying to be the only person that has any idea what’s going on. 1000 or plus horses. So for the average owner who has, you know, one or two, maybe 3 for the most part, that’s about average. It’s a lot easier for them to educate themselves on options for those 3 and then maybe go to the vet or the nutritionist or whoever and say, hey, this is what I’m finding.

How do you think this might fit into my horse’s health care program? It’s much more manageable and it makes all of our jobs in the industry sustainable because there is a lot of empathy fatigue, passion fatigue, because regardless of what anybody thinks, we don’t ever go out wanting anything bad to happen to any of, you know, client horses, but they are horses. Yeah. Right. And we put our heart and soul into it typically.

And it can be daunting, you know, when clients don’t take that into consideration. Yeah, for sure. Well, that is definitely good advice. This has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me.

How do people find you? Follow along with what you do, find your book, All of that good stuff. So I actually I have two books, but the one we were talking about today is called Equine Functional Nutrition, Understanding Root Cause to Restore Vitality. It’s available worldwide on Amazon or if you’re here in the States, you can order it on my website, which is indigoancestralhealth.com. I’m also on Facebook.

You can find me on LinkedIn. Not too active on Instagram, but it probably should be. So if I get a bunch of all new followers on Instagram, maybe I’ll start posting. Videos. That’ll be some good motivation.

Yeah, primarily Facebook and LinkedIn are the social media outlets that I use most frequently. And then there’s a lot of good, like other podcast episodes and long posts and things on my website for people that want to find more educational resources. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me. This was great.

Yes, thank you for having me. I always have a good time talking to you. Thanks so much.